CURATORIAL NOTES

The event has an experimental format, a mix of art films, live music and performances of different and heterogeneous artists. Eight participants were selected from over eighty applications, after an open call on the Rio Cinema social networks. The other ones were invited to participate. Many works were generoulsy made for the event theme. A strong loyalty to the theme and the key hosting of Granny, allowed me to mix such different works. The films were presented on the main screen as a flow, in alternation with the live performances, in the most organic way possible.

The prelude of the evening introduced themes such as the interconnection of all beings, to open the interpretation of our wild garden and start questioning death as a transformation rather than an end, thanks to the film Caves of Our Insides and a surreal questionnaire on winter fermentation. The film A Healing Opera depicted the healing power of nature and used natural elements to represent a reclaim for queerness, joy and self-expression. Similarly, artist Ada Null shared throw the technology of a receipt printer the intimate moments of ephemeral queer dates and garden wondering. I curated the following film screenings to let us reflect on the ontological meanings of gardening and wildness, finding help in AI (Data Gardens), the depiction of human hair as a regenerating soil (The Box) and the words of an Andrei Tarkovsky’s character.

“I wanted to redo the garden in my own taste, with my own hands. Yes, simply to please my mother. And for two solid weeks I went at it with shears and a scythe. I dug and cut, and sawed, and weeded…I kept my nose to the ground literally, and I took great pains to get it ready as soon as possible (…) In short, when I was finished, and everything was ready, I took a bath, put on fresh underwear, a new jacket, even a tie. Then I sat down in the chair to see what I had made, through her eyes as it were, I sat there…And looked out the window. I had prepared myself to enjoy the sight…Anyway, I looked out the window and saw… What did I see? Where had all the beauty gone? The naturalness of it? It was so disgusting! All that evidence of violence!” (THE SACRIFICE, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)

“Wildness has no goal, no point of liberation that beckons off in the distance, no shape that must be assumed, no outcome that must be desired. Wildness, instead, disorders desire and desires disorder. Beyond the human, wildness spins narratives of vegetal growth, viral multiplication, dynamic systems of nonhuman exchange.” (Jack Halberstam, 2020)

In the film The Box, the long dark hair of a woman is represented as a landscape, a dead tissue extending from a living body, a space in between life and death, as soil. The film, without the use of words, shows how act of care can activate an organism’s capacity to repair and regenerate itself. The event flow carried us embracing with humour the winter decay and feeling tenderness for our dead past, personal failures and vanishing illusions. The film Blank Narcissus, fictional memory of a former gay porn director, gorgeously represented this vision at the centre of the show and prepared the audience for the most surreal performances of the night. The closing animated film, The New Sun, weirdly connected all the themes of the night, without closing them at all: in a partly chanted poetic monologue by an anthropomorphic sun addressing a lover, catastrophism interweaves with hope, wisdom with naiveté.