Place Unmaking 

Q+A with Mark Williams and filmmakers at the Tuesday screening. Mark will introduce the films at the Wednesday screening.

Contemporary New Zealand film and video artists are often called on to engage in ‘place-making’ in public art projects and landscape film programmes. Yet moving image artists also play a role in ‘un-making’ place by interrogating or reinventing our heroic landscape tradition. This programme traces the promise of the post-war boosterism of government newsreels; the end of the neighbourly dream of state housing; urban beaches constructed from the soil of motorways; the bicultural politics of air; a taonga collection in Dusky Sound. New Zealand filmmakers also negotiate landscapes of the Americas – in Andrew Denton’s film of the escalating pine beetle epidemics that have decimated forests on the West Coast of the USA; and in Phil Dadson’s film shot in the isolated gorge in the Valle de Luna region of the Atacama Desert, northern Chile. These artists both document and construct imaginative, post-natural landscapes where social and bio-physical ecologies are captured in intimate performances of the camera. — JR & MW

Curated by Janine Randerson and Mark Williams. Presented by CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand – circuit.org.nz