Two premieres on one night: Garage Screen presents The Column (2013) by Venice Biennale artist Adrian Paci and El Mar la Mar by the Sensory Ethnography Lab member J.P. Sniadecki and independent filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta.
The Column (2013) by Albanian artist Adrian Paci was first shown at the 2013 exhibition Vies en Transit at Jeu de Paume in Paris. A visual essay, following a block of marble crossing the Indian Ocean on a Chinese vessel, the film creates a beautiful metaphor for the role of art in a globalized world. During the shipping of the marble, Chinese workers carve it into a Corinthian column: the logic of supply and demand pushes the makers to produce artworks as they ship them in order to save time and money.
El Mar la Mar was produced with the help of the Sensory Ethnography Lab that came to the spotlight after the release the experimental documentary Leviathan (2012) by its members Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, which seemed to offer the fishes’ perspective on the fishing industry. Despite its name, El Mar la Mar by filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki and independent filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta looks at life in the desert. El Mar la Mar is a story of people who are willing to risk their lives for a faint hope of a better future. It takes seven days to cross Sonoran Desert, and that’s only the very beginning of an illegal migrant’s journey from Mexico to the USA. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017.
The Column (2013)
Director Adrian Paci
Italy, 2013. 25 minutes 40 seconds
12+
El Mar la Mar
Directors J.P. Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta
USA, 2017. 94 minutes
12+