Fluid Forms: Films by Philip Cartelli

Screening and conversation

e-flux, Brooklyn, NY

Philip Cartelli, Slow Return (still), 2021.

e-flux Screening Room presents on Tuesday, June 27 at 7pm, a screening of works by Philip Cartelli, featuring Lampedusa (with Mariangela Ciccarello, 2015), France (with Mariangela Ciccarello, 2022), and Slow Return (2021), followed by a conversation with Cartelli, scholar Kenneth White, and curator Zachary B. Feldman. These three films explore diverse landscapes where the cinematic apparatus disturbs political borders, and those that occupy the terrain between past and present, solid and liquid, real and almost real. Cartelli’s work blends landscape cinema with experimental ethnography in an uncanny evocation of space and place.

Films:

Lampedusa (2015, 14 minutes, with Mariangela Ciccarello)
Lampedusa contemplates a moment in history from the early 1830s in which a volcanic eruption created new land just off the coast of Sicily. European powers scrambled to claim the island, which was subsequently subsumed by the ocean only six months after its creation, leaving only a shallow underwater ledge.

France (2022, 6 minutes, with Mariangela Ciccarello)
The formal simplicity of the hexagon, which refers to the idealized shape of metropolitan France, is countered by convoluted drawings and twisted branches of a coastal environment, evoking French colonial domination and the illusion of national unity and harmony.

Slow Return (2021, 80 minutes)
A river flows out to sea through a network of wetlands, salt marshes, and petrochemical plants. A melting glacier, its surface covered in protective cloth, still attracts tourists. Slow Return bridges the Rhone River’s extremities, where the natural environment is a resource and commodity, exploring shared legacies of dependence and exploitation embedded in their landscapes.

More information here.