Unorganized North Algoma

Single channel film, or installation with rose plexiglass after Robert Smithson's Mirror Displacements.

Organised around the 'event' of forest fire—but visualising fire only as trace—Unorganized North Algoma traces the complexities of the production of the Canadian landscape by white settler populations. The film juxtaposes audio-only interviews with local residents affiliated with forest-dependent industries with images of burned sites, aerial views, fire training exercises, and an inactive mill in a remote company town. It provides subtle insights into issues affecting communities with sparse and waning populations, and the monetisation of every aspect of the geological, the biological, and the social within the region. Fire has a cyclical temporality that is a pre-colonial temporality—it does not represent the ruin. The voices in this landscape are let down by perceptions of time: things take too long, or move very quickly as modes of gridding and expansion become more rapid and better controlled, despite the shrinking state.

—

Screened at AGO Long Winter, Toronto, 2014

Screened at South Kiosk, London, 2014

Screened at Real Crimes, Chalton Gallery, London, 2017