Where the Landscape Ends
Where the Landscape Ends is a film festival exploring the relationship between humans and the environment within the framework of capitalist extractivism and ongoing colonial histories. The program looks to problematise the human vs. nature dichotomy through the lenses of different filmmakers.
Where the Landscape Ends unfolds on the intersection of environmental exploitation and colonial histories as well as questions of gender, race, migration and labour. The festival investigates the historical conditions responsible for the current climate crisis and its unequal ramifications for different populations.
In what way are dominant understandings of “nature” and the relationship to the environment produced by a colonial and capitalist logic? How are the natural sciences entangled in colonialism? What are the extractivist interests tied up in the discipline of geology? These and other questions are given perspective on in the festival’s programming.
Where the Landscape Ends will be showing the films of Sanaz Sohrabi, Marina Resende Santos and Vincent Jondeau, Lisa Rave, Bo Wang and Pan Lu, Sybille Neumeyer, Raúl Silva Cuevas and Tian Guoxin.
Funded by Projektfonds Kulturförderung Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.
Scenes of Extraction
by Sanaz Sohrabi
Scenes of Extraction creates an archival constellation with the still and moving images of British Petroleum Archives, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British energy complex that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil operations in South East Asia. It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “Reflection Seismography” method for oil exploration which was heavily tested across the Iranian oil belt despite its destructive and probable nature. Scenes of Extraction unpacks the relationship between the political economy of photography, archival technologies, and the visual history of resource extraction in Iran.
Sanaz Sohrabi is a researcher of visual culture, and artist-filmmaker. Sohrabi’s works have been shown widely in exhibitions and film festivals including Berlinale Forum Expanded, International Film Festival Rotterdam, IndieLisboa, Valdivia International Film Festival Chile, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DocLisboa, Asian Art Biennial 2024, Ljubljana Biennial 2023, Block Museum Chicago, Moderna Museet Stockholm, SAVVY Contemporary Berlin, and VOX Centre de l'image contemporaine, Montreal, and Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon. Sohrabi is an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and RAW Académie. Sohrabi is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication Studies at Concordia University where she teaches courses on political economy of images, histories and theories of photography, and artistic research.
Wild Relatives
by Jumana Manna
Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings
by Wang Bo & Pan Lu
The devastating tropical climate created strong fear and anxiety in the British troops who were stationed at Hong Kong after the opium wars. The 19th Century myth of Miasma, the bad air, related epidemic diseases with air, environment and race, which later helped to consolidate the vertical segregation on Hong Kong island. Acclimatization efforts were made in pace with expansion of the British Botanic Empire, a global network of scientific researches of plants, which circulated not only botanic specimens but also images created for the purpose of study. In the particular case of Canton in South China, local commercial artists were commissioned to make plant paintings. This work examines the peculiar dynamics between imperialism, scientific research, race and the right to look in 19th Century Canton.
Bo WANG is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA, Garage Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, LUX & Open City Documentary Festival, Seoul Mediacity Biennale & DMZ Docs, and Sharjah Film Platform, among others. He is a recipient of major international awards, including New:Vision at CPH:DOX, Golden Dove at DOKLeipzig, O.F.F. Prize at Sesc_Videobrasil, Best Doc Short at Sharjah Film Platform, etc. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at the Rijksakademie from 2017 to 2018, as well as at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2016. He is a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam, and currently teaches at LUCAS, Leiden University.
PAN Lu is Associate Professor at Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Pan is author of three monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (2016), Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (2015), and Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China (2020). She is chief editor of The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong (2023) and The (Im)possibilities of Art Archives: Theories and Experience in/from Asia (2024). As a filmmaker, she co-directed Many Undulating Things (2019), Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017), Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (2016) with Bo Wang and Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia (2021) with Yu Araki. She was one of the curators of Kuandu Biennale, Taipei, 2018.
souvenirs entomologiques #1:odonata/ weathering data
by Sybille Neumeyer
„souvenirs entomologiques #1: odonata/ weathering data“ explores the entanglements of humans, weather and insects in a data driven world. It follows dragonflies on multiple scales through time and space: from their geological past into uncertain futures, from ecosystems to museum collections, from embodied weather worlds into detached data clouds while multiple insect identities are mediated, shaped and reshaped by co-evolving modes of mapping, monitoring and collecting.
On the edge of bio-cultural diversity extinctions, and situated in the new climatic regime, the speculative video essay traces the metamorphosis of a data bank into a consciously collecting network: pausing monological accumulations of data it is unlocking memory space for alternate knowledges, cultural values, colonial histories and eco-logical futures. While data based ontologies promise measures of anticipating and controlling futures the recollection of traditional eco–logical knowledges reframes observation as a practice of care.
The video essay is critically exploring the role of science museums, modern data practices as emerging from colonial pasts, the repercussions of digital knowledge infrastructures on ecologies, while recollecting insects as biocultural entities, and their sensoria as a reminder of embodied weather knowledge.
Sybille Neumeyer (based in Berlin) is an interdependent artist with a focus on environmental issues and eco–logical relationships. Her work is based on post-disciplinary research and collaboration. Through polyphonic (hi)storytelling, installations, walks, performative lectures, and video essays Neumeyer examines terrestrial communities, planetary metabolisms, and more-than-human atmospheres. In an ongoing research she examines climate literacies, multispecies weather worlds and data practices. Her works have been presented at LABoral Gijon, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Charité Berlin, Art Laboratory Berlin, Onassis Stegi, EXiS Film Festival Seoul, Kunsthaus Dresden, ZKM Karlsruhe and DESY Hamburg, Konstmuseet I Skövde, amongst others. Her research was supported and hosted by cultural and scientific institutions such as the department "Humanities of Nature" at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the RIFS - Research Institute for Sustainability (formerly IASS), Jan van Eyck Akademie, EU Taking Care Project, Akademie Schloss Solitude, amongst others. Currently, she is a postgraduate fellow at the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences at the Berlin University of the Arts.
628 Years of Potatoes
by Marina Resende Santos & Vincent Jondeau
An urban wasteland in a poor Berlin district becomes the site of a young woman's unusual quest. Neglected for years due to the exorbitant price demanded by its owner, the land transforms when the woman plants potatoes, joined by the neighbourhood children. As she connects with the land, the woman embarks on a poetic investigation of its value.
Marina Resende is an artist, publisher and researcher living in Berlin. Her work touches on unsettled problems of the coexistence between people, technologies, and so-called nature, often in public spaces, using strategies such as parody, conceptual gestures and land interventions. Marina studied comparative literature and critical theory at the Univesity of Chicago and holds a Master's degree in Raumstrategien from the Kunsthochschule Weissensee. Besides actions in public and occupied spaces, Marina has shared her work in spaces such as Defibrillator, Gallery 400, The Franklin, Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago), Materials and Applications (LA), Eiermannbau (Apolda), HAU, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Kunstenfestival Watou (Belgium), and Galerie Bernau, among others, and participated in residencies and invited exchanges at the Berliner Festspiele, de Appel, HELLERAU, and ACRE. She won the Mart Stam Preis 2024 and the first prize in the category "Environment" at the film festival ImagéSanté (Liège) for her work "628 Years of Potatoes." She currently teaches through research projects at the Institut für Architektur at TU Berlin.
Vincent Jondeau is a filmmaker and artist based in Berlin. After an initial degree in human sciences, he completed a double master's in media arts at the University of Paris VIII, followed by additional photography training at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. Through hybrid methods and interdisciplinary collaboration, he explores ecological forms of narrative by decentering the human gaze and incorporating the perspective and memory of plant beings. His work has been shown at venues such as Kunstquartier Bethanien and the Biennale Photo Mulhouse 2024 — where he appeared on the cover of the catalogue — as well as at film festivals like Regensburg Short Film Week and Imagésanté in Liège, among others. Alongside his artistic practice, he works in artistic heritage preservation as an archivist, with institutions such as the Wim Wenders and Alfred Ehrhardt Foundations.
Europium
by Lisa Rave
Using various levels of imagery, the essay film Europium draws connections between Papua New Guinea's colonial past and the planned excavation of raw materials from the Bismarck Sea. The film weaves a narrative around the rare earth element Europium; named after the European continent, the material will be culled from the ocean floor to ensure brilliant color images on smartphone displays and other flat screens, and of course for its fluorescent property, which is used to guarantee the authenticity of euro bank notes. The film describes this seemingly mundane fact as a return and repetition of history, pointing in the process not only to the complexity of human culture, its economies and systems of exchange, but also exposing the invisible ghosts of the past as they appear in the modern objects of our lives. (Philipp Kleinmichel)
Born in Guildford (UK), Lisa Rave lives and works in Berlin. In her film and photography work Rave often investigates colonial legacies and history’s repeating patterns in the complex interplay of culture, economy and ecology. Screenings and exhibitions include The Ecologies of Peace Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba Kolumbien, Climate Crisis Cultural Loss Ocean Space Venice, Mining Photography Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Circular Flow Kunstmuseum Basel or face value transmediale at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin. She recently participated in the Climate Action Artist Residency in Samoa, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.
Catch the living manners as they rise
by Raúl Silva Cuevas
In 1851, Peru financed the construction of the first passenger and cargo railway line in South America, linking Lima to the port of Callao. A symbol of development and national identity, the project marked the beginning of the construction of an extensive network of railway connections that would streamline and expand the market inside and outside the country in the following years.
The economic system was transitioning to a capitalist model and the country had become aligned with a vision of progress and modernisation, using as collateral a somewhat unusual element: vast mountains of fertiliser produced by birds that had accumulated on the islands of the Pacific coast. Known as “guano”, this element had attracted the interest of the industrial powers that were battling with a problem of soil fertility due, on the one hand, to the separation of the big cities and the countryside and, on the other, to the growth of the working-class population. This exchange gave Peru the liquidity it needed to access loans, which would subsequently attract new investors and consolidate new negotiations with industrial countries, using its own natural resources as its currency.
To extract guano in the mid-nineteenth century, nearly six hundred coolies arrived from China in the capacity of semi-slaves, and the guano quarries that promised prosperity and constant extraction for more than a thousand years dried up in less than sixty. A postage stamp commemorating the centenary of Peru’s first port city illustrates this apparently contradictory relationship between nature and technology. This stamp shows an image of the first railway line of Peru and South America decorated on both sides with guano birds.
In recent years, Raúl Silva (Lima, 1991) has been interested in how the acceleration and development of the economic system have impacted the natural ecosystem and the forms of socialization and cultural construction in Peru, connecting these phenomena to a series of causes and effects related to the global context. How have modernization processes shaped a separation between the countryside and the city? What logistical and production processes remain invisible within the social imaginary? What images have consolidated the way we see and understand everyday consumption geared towards progress? In his research, Silva analyzes the ideological and aesthetic nature of the archives that have accompanied these issues and develops a series of visual proposals, generally consisting of video works and digital design. In addition, media such as painting, drawing, or installation have become elements that accompany his process and serve as sources for notes, visual diagrams, or technical studies in manual reproduction.Silva was awarded with Propuestas/Vegap and Secuencias/Vegap (Madrid, ES) in 2024; he was also selected for the exhibition program Big Tech and Counter-Technologies, organized by Into the Black Box (Bologna, IT). He has received the Generación 2024 Prize awarded by La Casa Encendida and Montemadrid Foundation; he was an artist-in-residence in 2023 at the Centro de Residencias Artísticas at Matadero (Madrid, ES). Among his recent exhibitions are Maquina Fusionadora in Stain Projects (Palma de Mallorca, 2025), Naming Natures, Natural History Museum of Neuchâtel (Neuchâtel, CH) in 2024; Rayos de sol de Sudamérica, Crisis Galería (Lima, PE) in 2023; Relatos de un tiempo subvertido, La Parcería at Espacio Cómplices (Madrid, ES) in 2023; The coordinates are concealed, Imaginary Z (Hangzhou, CHN) in 2022; and Circular Gestures, Unanimous Consent (Zurich, CH) in 2022.
This kinda mining is not like mining; This kinda fishing is not like fishing; This kinda living is not like living.
by Tian Guoxin
Tian Guoxin’s film follows the singular viewpoint of a worker in a bitcoin-mine outwards into the contemporary ecological, economic, and cultural way of life on the Dadu River, in Sichuan, China. Cryptocurrency intrudes life on the river, competing for electricity off the grid, as well as young labour during the rainy season. The life of an already endangered fish species gets further disrupted. An overcapacity of hydropower production, also known as “stranded generation”, brings the highest density of bitcoin mining to the region and, alongside, groups of people without direction: drifting jobless during the river’s lower seasons.
Tian Guoxin was born in Sichuan, China, and lives and works in Berlin. Her multidisciplinary practice includes multimedia installation, sculpture and video. She recently exhibited at the n.t.w. Beijing; KW, Berlin; with the rubbles of old palaces, Berlin; Galerie Der Künstler*Innen, Munich; and Kunsthalle Baden Baden.