What are collapsing ancient landscapes trying to tell us? What keys might ancestral memories hold for our survival? What could we learn from the wind if we listened with intent? The three films in You Thought the World Was Yours When You Were Young but Now You Know it’s Disappearing collectively refuse a capital-driven, apocalyptic mode of being and offer alternative ways of relating with our world, from the woodlands of north Florida to the forests of Puerto Rico to the Atacama Desert in Chile.
A Q+A with David Rodriguez and Laura Sofía Pérez will follow the screening.
A pre-recorded Q+A with Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva will be available for viewing.
2705 SW 3rd Street, Miami, FL 33135
Dir. David Rodriguez / 4 minutes / 2022 / United States
Picture a Forest is an anti-landscape performing its own impossible, inevitable annihilation. The north Florida woodlands are fractured by strobe light, offering glimpses of their vitality and fragility. Over time, these flickering slices of the natural world become more corrupted and illegible, decaying into garbled datastreams. As the forest fails to preserve itself, it demands that we re-calibrate our vision.
Dir. Laura Sofía Pérez/ 13 minutes / 2023 / Puerto Rico
The voices of artist, poet, and archaeologist Estebán Valdés and Lares-born, self-identified indigenous countrywoman Pluma Bárbara carry us through the interior landscapes of Puerto Rico, sharing oral histories, ancestral knowledge, memories, and thoughts about how we create consciousness around our cultural identity. The film brings to the forefront histories about women who are bearers of great knowledge, innovation, and creation, along with moments of darkness that visually represent our gaps in knowledge due to racially and politically motivated erasure.
Dirs. Arjuna Neuman, Denise Ferreira da Silva / 50 minutes / 2023 / Austria, Germany
A speculative and poetic exploration of the
entanglements and overlaps of historical events in the Atacama Desert (Chile), Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, told from the perspective of the wind, takes us on a visual journey, floating freely through the many sites and histories of the Atacama. Exploring some of the largest lithium mines in the world; hovering above the remnants of colonial labor camps reactivated under the Pinochet regime, and slipping inside the international observatory of the ALMA large array facility; the filmmakers’ camera uncovers material trajectories whose planetary scope and historical depths remain invisible to the many. By pointing at how these trajectories mutated and expanded into aspects of modern geopolitical issues, the film exposes pillars of western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism while simultaneously proposing another worldview, one that is carried and echoed by the wind.
