New Worlders /
Do Novo Mondo
5 channel video installation /
Short Film - 30 mins
2022
Prospects and Concepts, Art Rotterdam, 2022
With the support of Mondriaan Fonds
An experimental nonlinear sci-fi story around the past and future of rubber where history and fantasy mingle.
Five performers dressed in latex suits in a black cube, with rubber tires as props read historical and original texts, they discuss them, they take turns representing different characters of the story, they build barricades and plot an interspecies political alliance with a mutant fungus from the Amazon that not only has the power to kill, but also to regenerate.
New Worlders - trailer
“New Worlders” points at the nickname colonisers gave to Americans, but also to the capacity to build new worlds. The young researcher, a Jewish Argentinian woman living in the near future, wonders about what took her aunt to the unknown. Through a fictional journey that takes responsibility for the obsession of "the West" about penetrating the so called virgin Amazon, she delves into the sexualised and violent narratives that haunt our imagination about that place: like worms in the skulls of the dead, like dreams in the minds of the living. This film is an attempt to create a different way of telling this story, by presenting a research based speculative near-future sci-fi story about the history and future of rubber, a hidden backbone of the global economy, much at the edge of collapse due to, in part, an unruly fungus. It concerns biopiracy in times of genetic engineering, the scope of synthetic fantasies, global production chains of supply, ecology, scientific innovation and resistance.
Producer, Writer and Director: Flora Reznik
3d Artist: Martin Menso
Camera: Ariela Bergman and Jesse Bom
Sound recording and sound post producer: Jorrit van Rijn
Editor and image post producer: Flora Reznik
Voice: Anne La Berge
Performers: Yun Lee, Tommy Ventevogel, Elen Braga, Mano Daniel Szollosi and Vera Goetzee
Music: Tomer Baruch / Trumpet: Tal Avraham
With the support of: Mondriaan Fonds