The Future Faces the Past: Fern Silva’s Rock Bottom Riser

We are excited to announce The Future Faces the Past, the thirteenth online screening in the Cosmos Cinema educational program as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week we present Rock Bottom Riser (2021, 70 min), a film by Fern Silva that will be available through February 17 on the Cosmos Cinema website.

Presented in the context of the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s focus on Indigenous cosmologies and alternative futures, this experimental documentary explores humans’ relationship to nature in Hawai’i, raising awareness of how the planned construction of a 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, the archipelago’s most sacred mountain, impacts upon Indigenous communities.

Inspired by ancestral interpretations of the entanglement of humankind, nature, and the cosmos, Rock Bottom Riser is a vibrant essay-film that takes inspiration from the material of geology, ethnography, and astronomy. A psychedelic tour of the islands, the film jumps from image to image and interweaves different voiceovers and scenes. Through these techniques, it urges viewers to consider the ways in which science can be a colonizing force, further marginalizing native Hawaiians and their traditional modes of inquiry while helping to criminalize their dissent.

The film is available for viewing through February 17 on cosmoscinema.art.

The Cosmos Cinema website is where the histories of cinema excavated in weekly screenings at the Power Station of Art meet the moving-image works of artists represented in the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Each week, in alignment with one of the nine thematic sections that structure Cosmos Cinema, a selected moving-image work by one its artists is presented online with new contextualizing information. The Cosmos Cinema website features works by artists including Itziar Barrio, Yin-Ju Chen, Saodat Ismailova, Deimantas Narkevičius, Liu Xin, Maha Maamoun, Agnieszka Polska, Raqs Media Collective, Ho Rui An, Liu Yujia, He Zike, Julieta Aranda, Jakub Štourač and Anna Lunakova, and Zhou Xiaohu, among many others.

Cosmos Cinema Educational Program and online platform are made possible by .ART Registry.

It is also co-sponsored by Aesop and Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus of Duke Kunshan University.