In August 2020, we invited video artists from Canada and Germany to submit their ideas on the topic "The City in Times of the Virus": Will nature reconquer the inner cities? How do social rules and medical hygiene rules affect our bodies? How will we move in the urban space? How will we interact in the era of social distancing? - The eight selected videos will be projected after dark onto screens placed in the storefront windows of the Goethe-Institut Montreal on Boulevard St. Laurent until March 2021.
Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off)
Director : Lukas Marxt
About the film
The Imperial Valley represents one of California´s most important regions of industrial agriculture. Corporate agricultural production interests have been able to successfully cultivate and exploit this geological part of the Sonora desert through a gigantic irrigation system fed by the Colorado River, as well as the All-American Canal specifically engineered for this purpose and which attained sad notoriety through the Mexican migration movement. The system´s run-off flows through pipes, pumps and canals leading to the Salton Sea, an artificial lake that is approaching ecological as well as economic disaster, just as bordering regions of Mexico.
With
Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) Lukas Marxt approaches this problem in a very ingenious way. He begins with a bird´s eye view of an irrigation canal coursing through a desert landscape. A drone camera flies the length of the canal, subsequently flying over Imperial Valley landscapes from the same perspective. Initially appearing as nothing more than spectacular documents of agricultural monocultures, the shots become increasingly abstract – additionally heightened through the accompaniment of an electronic score. Is this an actual or artificially simulated landscape? This ambiguity is precisely the point: The Imperial Valley is becoming the "Uncanny Valley", a place that is not yet or no longer natural and thereby appears eerie. A landscape post landscape (or its medial representation) is a geometric concept of lines, surfaces, points and color spots, regardless whether of an animate or lifeless nature. Although manmade, it is not a place for people anymore, neither ontologically nor in reality. The post-apocalypse is not a matter of the future, we are already in the thick of it. (Claudia Slanar)
About Lukas Marxt
Lukas Marxt is an artist and filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt’s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
Marxt has shared his research in the visual art and cinema contexts. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2019), at Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, (Krems 2019), at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous international film festivals including Locarno Film Festival (Swiss, 2019), Viennale (Austria, 2019), Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival, where he received the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018). Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea.
Jury statement
A film of great mastery that offers a glimpse into the future as the industrial world collapses. After all the excesses, what will remain of our cities? (Miryam Charles)
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