TRANSLATION PLEASE
2024
16mm and digital video, collage, light box, a life preserver, paintings on silk and
a paper cut by Erik Ruin
Lighting and Shadows by Drew Simpson and Liz Howls.
Additional assistance from Jim Destaebler, Tom Robinson, Alec Dunn, Sean Tejaratchi and Adam Bacher.
Music by Jim Nollman plays in between each video loop.
Folkways Records will be releasing a new album of his called Orca’s Greatest Hits in 2026.
synopsis:
In 2009, I was awoken by a phone call that was the wrong number. In the moment after hanging up, I remembered that I was in a dream where I was inside a laboratory, and there were many different sized cages with all sorts of animals inside of them. Animals that you wouldn't expect in a lab, like lions and deer, as well as rats, beagles, cats and mice. They were all psychically pleading with me to help them.
In 2021 I spent a week at the Basement FIlms artist's residency in New Mexico, where filmmakers have access to over 8000 16mm films that had been discarded from educational and religious institutions. The memory of my dream arose again. I decided to look for films that were about animal experimentation. When I punched "vivisection" or "animal experiments" into the index on the computer, nothing came up. So I started to walk the room, and the first film can that called out to me was "Animal Communication", in which I saw chimps learning sign language, I then found a film about people scuba diving in the Bermuda Triangle, with an underwater piano, to try and communicate with dolphins.
These days we find ourselves wondering what the orcas are doing when they capsize boats.
This video installation is the fruit from the seed of that dream I was awoken from.
It touches on my own experiences of hearing things that a lot of people can not, and on people trying to make us more aware of things we can not hear, on intra-species communications, like the work of Jim Nollman, who played music for and with Orcas in the Salish Sea in the 70's, like artist Lisa Schonberg, who records insects in the wild and creates musical compositions with their sounds, of Project CETI, using AI to try and translate the codas of Sperm whale clicks, and of siren, healer, composer Michaela Harrison, who sings to whales in the wild waters off Brazil.
All the while while editing this piece over the last year, I heard thousands of pleas from Palestinians on Instagram,
and this installation contemplates the people who are trying really hard to listen, and the people who are hardly listening.
premiere:
November 2024, Anita, Astoria, Oregon
There also was a film screening of some of my filmed places, stories and histories of Cascadia with scores by musicians living in the Pacific Northwest on the closing day of the show November 30th at 7PM.
And there was a film screening that I curated on the 27th of September at Anita and the 28th of September at Skyline Tavern Project in Portland.
MIND FETCH
Rankin Renwick presents a program of four short films which speak to human animal/animal borders, be it our desire to consume, to merge, to wear, to listen, to fuck, to translate.
60 minutes.
Prized
by Colleen Plumb
4:20 , 2024, HD video US
A film to recognize and acknowledge the lives and bodies of fur-bearing animals, and those who know the terror of being hunted. Taken for admiration, consumed for luxury and desire, status, wealth, and yet death, murder, and prone-to-rot disgust is evoked. Rooted in evolutionary history, no longer a practice for survival, simply perpetuated and elevated—a distortion of worth. Flashes of anonymous fur-clad women, a meat-locker of furs, and satisfied hunters weave an ominous and regretful status quo.
Colleen Plumb makes photographs, videos, and installations that engage with more-than-human worlds and that consider the interconnectedness between all beings upon Earth. Her work has explored the industrial food system, ways animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, how striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011) critically documents our ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb's recent photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants. Through partnering with nonprofit organizations advocating for animals, Plumb seeks to shift dialog around what is humane. A third-generation Chicagoan, Colleen Plumb grew up in Rogers Park neighborhood, without a real understanding that she lived on the stolen land of the Potawatomi. Currently she lives on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations. Plumb serves as faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Johnson
by Rebecca Barten
19:50, 2023, HD video, US.
Inspired by the pre-sexual fascination of girls with horses, Johnson is a romantic incantation and interspecies love story of eternal structures of queer eros and transformation. As told by a narrator, Johnson is a horse who is the object of the ceaseless praise and unknowable desire of a dreamy silent performer. The movie is a collaged poetic narrative constructed of vintage video technology, miniature tableaux, eerie dreamscapes, pantomimic gestures, and an existential humor intrinsic to navigating the human condition.
Rebecca Barten is an experimental filmmaker and collage artist. She has made poetic works both in 16mm film and video and was the co-founder of Total Mobile Home Microcinema in San Francisco and Exploded View Microcinema in Tucson.
Blua
by Carolina Charry Quintero
22 min., 2017 16MM & HD. Black and white and Colour. Sound Columbia
Humanity and animality are enigmatically confronted and entwined. Combining rich high-contrast 16mm images with crisp digital color scenes, BLUA composes an uncanny entry into the relationship between human and animal existence. Unfolding like a tapestry, its montage complicates the relationship between observation and fiction. The frontiers between animal and human, fiction and nonfiction are transgressed. Reaching for equal beauty and strangeness, BLUA seeks an assertion of the uncanny, a cine-poetic philosophical speculation.
Carolina Charry Quintero is an artist from Cali, Colombia. Including films, installations, and writings her work meditates on utopian and dystopian ideas of nature, fragmented and cyclical ideas of time, the uncertainty of vision, and light and darkness as both experiences and metaphors. She is interested in the human-animal border as a place of thought and experience, as a place to revise the grand definitions of what is human and the ethical, political, and philosophical issues that arise at this border.
She has published two books: Two Three One (2022), a book of poems as well as a sound performance in collaboration with two musicians, and Mammoth (2024), a hybrid genre book composed of short stories, visual poetry, and free verses. Mammoth was recently presented at the New York Latin American Triennial in July 2024.
Her work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janerio, Boulder Museum of Modern Art in Colorado, Museum La Tertulia in Cali, and as part of the Latin American Retrospective of Experimental Cinema by the Pacific Standard Time Project "Ism, Ism, Ism, Experimental Cinema in Latin America" in Los Angeles. She has also screened at film festivals such as Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Chicago Underground, and Indie Grits. She is the recipient of the Creative Grant For Emerging Artists by the Ministry of Culture in Colombia 2017 and the Original Literary Work Publishing Grant 2023. She holds an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BA in Philosophy and Visual Arts from Universidad del Valle in Cali.
https://cargocollective.com/carolinacharry
Translation Please
by Rankin Renwick
15 min 2024 16MM & HD video. Black and white and Color. Sound US
A film about people who are trying hard to listen, and people who are hardly listening.
Made with help from The Ford Family Foundation, The Oregon Arts Commission and The Regional Arts and Culture Council.
Rankin Renwick is an artist by nature, not by stress of research. They put scholars to rout by embracing nature's teaching problems that have fretted trained minds. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, their iconoclastic work embodies their interest in landscape and transformation, and relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders. They have been a singular voice in the experimental cinema for over 40 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around them. Often focusing their lens on nature, freedom and the locales of their adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues. An artist who often self-distributes, their screening history reads as a map of independent cinema worldwide. They have screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, institutional and not, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others.
Rankin Olivia Metolius Renwick is a non-binary artist of Scottish and German descent, born on the traditional and unceded territory of the Illiniwek in what is now known as Chicago, Illinois. They live and work as an uninvited guest on the traditional territory of the Chinookan peoples, now known as Portland, Oregon.
https://www.odoka.org/
Presented at Sky Tav Project, Portland, Oregon on the 28th of September 2024
Many thanks to all of the artists for generously letting us screen their films
and to Scott Becker for inviting us into his space to let us share our visions.
Thanks to Liz Harris and Anita for allowing me to have the world premiere in this beautiful space.