Ghost in the Landscape: Three Films by Lois Patiño

Please join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, November 15 at 7pm for Ghost in the Landscape, a screening of three films by Lois Patiño preceded by a video introduction by the artist. 

Every landscape has its ghost: Neglected or obliterated events and experiences continue to weigh on archetypal history. Lois Patiño, a Spanish filmmaker and artist, focuses on landscapes to revive these ghosts and remind us of more-than-human pasts and futures. In this screening, we will watch Patiño’s Mountain in Shadow (2012), Night Without Distance (2015), and The Sower of Stars (2022), synaesthetic and meditative landscape films that via cinematic means overcome our perceptual limits, and create sensorial confusions to open up the spectral spaces situated between the past and the future.

Films

Mountain in Shadow (Montaña en sombra, 2012, 14 minutes)
The film depicts a snowy mountain and the activities of skiers gradually passing from the physical to the metaphysical. The grandeur of the landscape contrasts with the insignificance of images of people who from a distance seem nearly unnoticeable. Beginning with white snow, the film’s image gradually darkens and flattens, losing its depth in pursuit of visual abstraction. A play on the perception of scales, where the immensity of the mountain becomes muddled with a microscopic vision, continues throughout the film, lending it a surreal and ghostly atmosphere. Landscape-viewing is transformed into a tactile experience.

Night Without Distance (Noite Sem Distância, 2015, 23 minutes)
A film as a flashback. Smuggling activities between Portugal and the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia have been practiced for centuries. The Gerês Mountains have no clear state-drawn borders. Rocks, the river, and trees are silent witnesses for smugglers who must wait until the night comes to cross the fictitious lines separating Spain from Portugal. The immobility of the shots and an experimental color treatment emphasize the feeling of spectrality and timelessness of this landscape, filled with ghosts from forgotten pasts.

The Sower of Stars (El sembrador de estrellas, 2022, 25 minutes)
The metropolis is drawn by distant lights. Shining ships carrying sleeping passengers arrive, and the night turns liquid. The sower of stars wakes the passengers up and they travel through the city, chatting about this and that while bidding farewell to everything. This film is a dream-like journey through the nocturnal universe of Tokyo, representing the limbo space between life and death, where the borders between the imaginary and the real blur and spectrality comes to reign.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility         
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.       
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.       
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.