This afternoon we welcome you to a film screening, introduction by Rikke Luther, wine and snacks – everyone is welcome and admission is free as always.

Rikke Luther’s new film Dust & Flow, draws together recent scientific research on mud and sediment flows, eDNA, and the concept of ‘deep-time’, with personal responses to the planet’s new moving landscapes, examining the way humans are attempting to make sense of impossibly rapid changes occurring in the Earth System.

The ground beneath our feet is now moving – at human speeds. The body of the Earth bleeds mud. The synthesis of earth and water does not speak, but stares blankly back at us. Strangely forceful winter rains no longer connect to ground water; and new mud-lakes claim once fertile fields. Elsewhere, the rains propel muds down swollen river courses to the sea; unprecedented sedimentary flows congregate off-shore, causing biochemical changes to the oceans we do not yet understand. Closer the centre of the heat, where fish swam half a century ago, ‘Lake Chad’ is now a dried-out mud-scab. Everywhere, the natural foundations that supported the mechanics of Modernity are warping and dissipating – speeding change; re-programming us. And we struggle, as if to catch a bullet in flight; desperately attempting to update our understanding of this new biochemical topography.

Dust & Flow examines the deep history of the ocean-land relation and the very recent development of new ‘mud-scapes’. The film weaves developments on the islands of Gotland, Iceland, and Svalbard, with up-to-the-moment scientific research and our culturally-limited understandings of history and time. Hung-up on human conceptions of History and politics, we struggle to understand the vastly accelerated scale of movement and time demonstrated by the muds.

Luther’s visual engagements with these fast-mutating landscapes stretches the objective ‘documentary form’ to allow an account the author’s own subjective interior dialogue. The innovative script is voiced by the actor David Bateson, performing the roles of the narrator, Luther, Luther’s inner dialogue, and two additional characters.

The Ocean-Lands is attempting to outline the social, political, and bio-chemical, implications of rapid movements in the planet’s new ‘mud-scapes’.

The film forms part of Luther’s Novo Nordisk-funded post-doctoral project The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System, based at Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdis Finnbogadottir’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS) at Copenhagen University. The film is a response to a NAARCA-funded commission, and has been produced with additional funds from Art Hub Copenhagen, The Danish Arts Foundation and the Swedish Arts Council. The film draws on NAARCA-funded site-visits.

In 2021 and 2023, preparatory work and process-oriented material has been presented in ANA in the exhibitions “The New Mud” and “Mud in the Earth System”.

Still image / Still pondering is a screening and re-mediation of the video work The Artist as Editor? (Proposal for a story about Emilie Demant Hatt).

The work, from 2023, focuses on the female Danish painter and writer Emilie Demant Hatt (1873-1958), her early travels to Sapmi and the limited contemporary recognition of her research and art practice. At the same time, it focuses on how chance encounters, material fascination and emotional impact can expand the institutional boundaries of official archives.

Still image / Still pondering is also a meditation on film editing as research practice.

The video material used in the work is partly generated at previous showings in Astrid Noack’s Atelier: In 2020, the focal point was the book Muitalus sámiid birra by Johan Turi (1854-1936) – the first book written in Sami by a Sami, translated and published in Copenhagen in 1910 by Emilie Demant Hatt. Two years later in 2022, Astrid Noack’s Atelier housed New Notes – an display aesthetic setting for conversations about Emilie Demant Hatt’s navigation of her roles as a woman, painter, writer and researcher.

In film editing, the cut is certainly the act with which something is omitted, deferred or even cut into pieces. The incision is about making a choice to eliminate or exclude a material. But instead of asking what ‘a cut’ leaves out, I’m interested in how ‘cutting’ and ‘splicing’ rub against each other. For the cut  is also crucial to the decisive moment of cutting a relationship between two segments, in as much as the decision to splice is about bringing two things together.

I understand splicing on the basis of my own training and experiences as a visual artist – experiments with montage strategies and other artists’ work with assemblage theory and conceptualisations of cinematic ‘gaps’ has taught me to think of video stills as open elements in the power of constructed narratives.  Emilie Demant Hatt’s practice has directed my attention to how specific environments and viewing situations not only affect what I see; they become part of what I see!

In other words, the friction between cutting and splicing makes it interesting to dwell on artistic production of social relations as editing practice. At a time when Danish colonial history and colonial relations are suddenly on everyone’s lips, can ‘the artist as producer’ be usefully described as an ‘editor’?

To explore all this, during my residency at Astrid Noack’s Atelier, I have invited a few visual artists and colleagues to reflect on and respond to how they work with and think about editing as research practice. The hope is an exchange that can develop into experiments with film editing processes and collaborative/editorial artistic authorship in my long-term artistic research project Scenes of Fieldwork (2025-2027).

Everyone is welcome!

PROGRAMME

Opening on Friday 7 March 4-6 pm

Film screening (every half hour), Saturday 8 March 3-5.30 pm

Film screening (every half hour), Tuesday 11 March 3-5.30 pm

Film screening (every half hour), Wednesday 12 March 3-5.30 pm

Film screening (every half hour), Saturday 15 March 3-5.30pm

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

BIO

Eva la Cour is a visual artist and researcher, also trained in media and visual anthropology. Through the use of analogue film, video, text and display aesthetics, her artistic research and practice revolves around the relationship between thought and image, archive and social process, authenticity and authority. She holds a practice-based PhD from HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, where, based on experiences from Svalbard, she investigated ‘live editing’ as a performative and situated cinematic expression and method for reorienting the colonial legacy of linear storylines. Since then, she has worked investigatively across filmmaking, academic research and visual arts, including as a postdoc at ‘Art as Forum’, UCPH (2022-2024) and currently at the Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking, UCPH (2025-2027).

Pia Rönicke, Bordered, digital film, 31.01 min, 2021