Nour Sokhon: «Matters of Grey» (2015 / 2023)
«Matters of Grey» is a work that questions the ideologies of our current social quota and its affect on our definition of humanity. – Nour Sokhon
Nour Sokhon: «Revisiting: Hold Your Breath» (2018)
Director/Editor/Colorist: Nour Sokhon
Sound: Ziad Moukarzel & Nour Sokhon
Videography: Moath Habli & Lea Zraika
Light assistant: Doris Artemis Rehban
This fictional film encourages people to fight throwaway culture, specifically in Lebanon. The soundscape reflects the impact that noise pollution has on the abiotic and biotic sounds present within the marine habitat. – Nour Sokhon
Cynthia Zaven: «Kingdom» (2010 / 2022)
Camera: Marco Milan
Music: «Stilleflytande» by Sigbørn Apeland
Sound: Cynthia Zaven
«We were two thousand passengers, crammed on the decks of a ferry that couldn't contain more than a few hundred. We left at 6 am from a bay in the North. At 9 am they began targeting our boat.» Kingdom is a recollection of a recurrent dream following a 24 hour journey out of Lebanon while under Syrian blockade, in April 1989. – Cynthia Zaven
Only a few meters separate the house of Alberto Baeriswyl Pittet from the sea, and twice this distance separates it from the sub-Antarctic forest. This proximity creates a perfect triangulation, where the apex on which the house is built touches exactly the fifty-fourth latitude of the Southern Hemisphere, considering the world as a sphere.
In the 19th century, millions of Europeans emigrated to the Americas. Marie Pittet, Alberto Baeriswyl Pittet’s mother and a citizen of the city of Fribourg in Switzerland, was one of them. She was among the 143 Fribourgeoises who, between 1871 and 1891, decided to try their luck in South America, specifically in the emerging Punta Arenas.
The Chilean government, aiming to populate Patagonia, offered ideal conditions to Swiss colonizers , including a free journey and the option to acquire large tracts of land at low prices. When Alberto came of age, he set about exploiting the densely forested wilderness of Puerto Yartou. An industrial pioneer, the large territory Alberto occupied was formerly inhabited by native communities (Selk'man, Kawesqar, and Yamanas) who were displaced and broken up by the country's redevelopment plan.
The remote place where he would build his house is a small bay on the east Riviera of Tierra del Fuego, facing the Whiteside Channel from the Magellan Strait. It would later become a little village, founded around 90 years ago, with a complex of sawmill factories, timber mill and farms. Today, apart from the restored administration house, only traces of this industry remain. The primary material for building houses was wood, most of which has slowly eroded over time due to strong winds. All that remains, like the skeleton of a large mammal, are heavy metal pieces lying on the ground, too weighty for the winds to carry away.
Alberto's house, as previously mentioned, is situated in a kind of limbo between the sea and the forest, and, in a more symbolic sense, between water and fire. These two elements play a crucial role in Puerto Yartou, serving as key components that underscore our dependence on nature. Water is pumped from a river twice a day, collected in a large capacity container, and then transported and distributed throughout the house by the water system. Wood is a ubiquitous local obsession: it must be continually chopped, stored, and burned. This natural resource and its transformative process reminds me of didactic visual diagrams from my primary school biology lessons. Those illustrations simplified the well-known food pyramid and explained the combustion of energy in the form of Kcal in the human body. In the house, where the only way to heat food is a wood stove, I picture myself a closed circuit: the human energy used to cut and carry the wood is directly proportional to the energy released by the fire (wood combustion).
During my stay on the fifty-fourth latitude, living in Alberto's house was like stepping into his past. The house was initially constructed in a primitive manner around 1906 and later expanded in 1920. It underwent a patrimonial restoration in 2010, salvaging elements of its original construction and attempting to recreate its 1945 interior design. The interior restoration adhered to an inventory from that era found in the family archives. Today, only the infrastructure and some wallpapers remain original. Slipping from one room to another, the walls exude a smell reminiscent of spaces sealed for too long, infused with the aroma of burnt wood and humid tapestry. When the front door is fully open, a little gust of wind enters, bringing with it the scent of the sea. Just a few metres away, it caresses the shore, bringing along various creatures—motionless small crabs hiding in their homes, wafer-thin shells eroded by salt, and garlands of twisted algae. The entwined giant kelp awaits another high tide, pondering whether it will be carried home or left to dry, blacken, crumble, and likely succumb under the sun's intense glare.
The huiro (phonetically pronounced weero, easily confused by non-native Spanish speakers with the English expression weirdo), is a seaweed baptised by the Chileans. Its scientific name is Macrocystis pyrifera. Slimy and wrapped in a gelatinous membrane, from which round blades filled with gas and liquid sprout like tentacles, the huiro leaves behind liquid traces. This morphological plasticity evokes the movement of alien creatures in science fiction films. Scientific studies state that giant kelp, with sufficient nutrients, can grow in the order of 15cm a day, almost twice as fast as Gremlins. Intrigued, I decided to keep some in a bucket of water to observe this living being more closely. Day after day, the water was absorbed by the critter, and it became increasingly thick and viscous, resembling a green jelly cake from the 70s. I was not surprised when I learnt that huiros are used for food production. The alginate is extracted and employed for thickening, gelling, and film forming. Another curious aspect is that seaweeds appear prominently in the traditional corpus of local myths and folk- tales, as well in the practice of witchcraft, especially in the island of Chiloé. One story narrates the existence of a magical creature, a seahorse the size of a horse and with the same shape, but with a long snout, fin-like legs and a firm propelling tail, similar to that of a fish. This seahorse has the power to transport witch doctors, who are the only ones able to see the mythical creatures. Fed on seaweed, this gives them a dark greenish-yellowish tone. After dying, their bodies are transformed into a jelly mass which quickly dissolves in the brackish waters of the sea, thus integrating with other aquatic beings.
Flora is an integral component of the constitution of the cultural landscape, serving as a fundamental contributor to the survival of the earliest humans inhabiting temperate coasts. Among the Yaghan people, a traditional practice among women involved using the stalks of huiro for fishing. The seaweed proved to be excellent fishing gear, with hooks attached and baited using remnants of mussels or leftover sea lion or bird meat. Various types of fish were caught all year round.
Around the blue hour, while seated at the table in Alberto's dining room, I observed the extraordinary play of light above the sea. It was a strange experience: colours and tones never seen before, intense and sharp, oscillating from shiny gold to blue. While the light was shimmering, my finger traced the carvings of the table. To my surprise, I realized I was drawing plants—following long, twisted stems, petals, flowers, and perhaps even huiros. With my fingers stuck in a notch too small for my ring finger, I kept thinking that that table could have been manufactured from colonised wood, perhaps cut and carved from a tree from the local area. Why are ornamental motifs of nature carved into wood? The process seemed a bit paradoxical. Wood is taken from its natural habitat, industrialized, processed, placed in a completely foreign environment, and then adorned with a 'natural touch.' Can we interpret this gesture as form of restitution to nature? I don’t think so. Yet, with my finger stuck, I began to reflect on these two elements: living nature (non-human) and dead nature (human). I shifted my focus to huiro as the embodiment of living nature and the furniture of the house as the embodiment of dead nature. They became the two main protagonists of my video project.
Inspired by science fiction narratives, I filmed sequences of still shots inside the house, aiming to convey the atmosphere characterized by various tapestries and details of dark wood furniture: carved floret- framed panelled and inlaid table legs, with columns and sculpted paw feet capable of supporting heavy tabletops. In the video, huiro, the living critter, subtly moves, almost imperceptibly taking possession of the furniture. It grows, clings to the legs of a table as if he was going to strangle them and reaches for the sideboard, leaving its slobbery traces on the marble support, gradually darkening it. The quality of materials, the agglutination of totally dissimilar elements, and the interplay among living and the inert, creates a tense and uncanny feeling. In conversation with the neuroscientist Tomás Ossandon, who also participated in the residency, we discussed the behaviour of the human brain when encountering the new or unknown. He explained to me that when a bizarre or surprising incident occurs, , such as seeing algae move outside of its normal habitat, the brain has two responses. The first is an immediate, unconscious response processed in the primitive brain, specifically in the insula (Latin for island), located in the limbic system. The second response is prediction error. Our brains rely on predictions, and if our predictions do not align with reality, the brain quickly generates a new logical structure to make predictions with the new information available. This event is called a ‘salient experience’, which occurs in this case when an element seems to escape its environment.
I conceived this video to leave various possible interpretations open, stimulating each viewer's mind differently. Those who enjoy being in control may feel disoriented or taken aback. The slimy, wobbly creature is challenging to grasp, control, and manipulate. This metaphor of possession serves as a reminder of the exploitation of the forest and, consequently, the environmental impact caused by the Swiss settlers. Others might focus on the materiality of the house and seaweed, contemplating the film's pictorial qualities reminiscent of the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio's still life paintings. I personally prefer to offer a reverse colonisation, where nature takes over the human.
Text: Valentia Pini