Nikola Brabcová & Karin Šrubařová: Erosion
Thomas Pausz, Making New Land / Silica Cinema
Making New Land / Silica Cinema. Digital Film, 6 min, 2024
Silica Cinema is part of the Making New Land project, a series of eco-fictions inspired by Thomas Pausz ́ research in the erosion of the coasts in Normandy and Iceland. The film stages contemporary debates on the protection of the coasts in a series of short poetic sequences.
Eroding coastlines are contested territories, inhabited by humans and non-humans. Part of Silica Cinema was filmed on a beach used by traditional local shell pickers for many generations. This beach will soon be made a human-exclusion zone, in order to protect its rare ecosystem. The erosion of sand is therefore doubled by the social erosion of the community of shell pickers, reminding us that ecology is always ecology of an inhabited landscape, and with the eroding landscape also disappears the collection of know-how and practices of indigenous people.
The images of both archival footage and original footage collected by Pausz in his coastal expedition are projected on a custom made sand screen, an ephemeral projecting surface mirroring the fragility of the beaches.
The first part of Making New Land is the fictional essay An intertidal Aesthetics . and stages the debate between the hard landscaping of the coasts with concrete sea walls to prevent erosion and the alternative method of repopulating the coastal forest by planting pioneer plants.
Thanks to: Artyčok.TV, Alžběta Bačíková, Janek Rous, Nikola Brabcová, Karin Šrubařová, Magnus Bergsson, Vikram Pradhan, Samira Hauserman, Paul Duncombe, Kamil Izaret, Helga Kjerúlf, Laboratoire Modulaire
Thomas Pausz is a designer, artist and researcher born in Paris and based in Reykjavík. Pausz’s trans-disciplinary practice explores alternative ecologies and unforeseen interactions between life forms and media. In 2022-24, Thomas was appointed Stanley Picker Fellow in Art & Design for his project Haunted Ecologies. In 2022-23, he was artist in residence at the Laboratoire Modulaire, a structure dedicated to artistic practices in digital spaces at ESAM (France). In parallel with exhibitions and media works, Thomas publishes critical essays and eco-fiction. Upcoming exhibitions include Haunted Ecologies, a solo exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery (UK, April 2024); Silica Cinema, a film for the curated online exhibition Regeneration on Artyčok.tv (CZ, 2024) and Species Without Spaces at the festival Interstices (July 2024). Recent exhibitions include Neo Materialities at le Cube Garges (2024), Nature in Transition, Shifting Identities, Nordic House Reykjavik (2021); Interspecies Futures, Center for Book Arts, New York (2020) The Wildflower, Hafnarborg Museum, Reykjavik (2020); Creatures Made to Measure, Musée du Design de Gent (2019); The Swamp Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2018); Follow The Flow, Atelier Luma Arles (2017); Srishti Live, Bangalore, India (2017); Market and Movements, Delfina Foundation, London (2016); Hortus Praxis, MUDAM Luxembourg (2011). Pausz is Associate Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts and MA program leader of Design & New Environments.