In collaboration with the UBC Film Society, the Belkin presents a short program of films selected by Holly Schmidt that resonate with Vegetal Encounters, her slow residency in the gallery’s Outdoor Art Program.  The selected films, Wild Relatives, Fordlandia and Indigenous Plant Diva, engage in multiform ways with questions of presentness, biodiversity and learning from the relationships between human and non-human beings. Taking place at UBC’s Normand Bouchard Memorial Theatre (The Norm) in UBC Life Building, this screening is free but space is limited; to register, email us at belkin.rsvp@ubc.ca with your name, age and number of guests. Proof of vaccination will be required.

Prior to the film screening at The Norm, join us for an online poetry reading at 4 pm with Dallas Hunt as part of the UBC Reads Sustainability series. Hunt, a poet, professor and member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation), will read from his recently published collection of poetry Creeland. For details and to register, visit the event page.

About Vegetal Encounters and the Films

Holly Schmidt’s Vegetal Encounters plays out along a series of pulses. Weather shifts, seasons change and a world of plants, insects and fungi grows in kind, transforming in small surges. Mirrored by the short, poetic beats in the clerestory windows, and using a gradual succession planting model to generate biodiversity, the Fireweed Fields meadow is at once a site for artistic, scientific and literary conversations. Inviting reflection across disciplines and engagement between human and non-human actors, the meadow creates a space for discursive learning and the making of meaningful connections.

Kamala Todd’s portrayal of T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss in Indigenous Plant Diva evokes a closeness that eases in throughout the film’s nine-minute run. It is at once a story of intergenerational learning and a love letter to the plants of Vancouver and the lessons that emerge from careful listening. Melanie Smith’s Fordlandia invokes what she describes as a horizontality between the animal, human and machine worlds.¹ She takes an intimate approach, cross-cutting close-up shots of animals moving through their worlds with relics of twentieth-century Fordist production. In interspersing these converging moments with wide shots of the surrounding rainforest, Smith emphasizes an evocative relationship between the part and the whole, noting that “it’s all macro or micro, there’s no in-between.”² In Wild Relatives, Jumana Manna situates seed banks as modernist projects whose modes of operation are defined by both preservation and erasure.³ The banks, dedicated to the preservation and circulation of enhanced seeds, function at the expense of landraces and the “wild relatives” from which landraces develop.⁴ Questions of biodiversity, relationality and the complicity of capitalism and colonialism in perpetuating the climate crisis subtend the dialogue between them, while also creating interstices for growth and renewal.

Notes

1 Melanie Smith, “Finding possibility in what might seem impossible,” Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DladoqXe7Y.

2 Melanie Smith quoted in Kimberlee Córdova, “Fordlandia Fever Dream: Melanie Smith at Lulu,” San Francisco Art Quarterly, September 11, 2015, https://www.sfaq.us/2015/09/fordlandia-fever-dream-melanie-smith-at-lulu/#_ftnref2.

3 “Wild Relatives: Jumana Manna Interviewed by Hakim Bishara,” BOMB Magazine,  https://bombmagazine.org/articles/wild-relatives-jumana-manna-interviewed/.

4 Shela Sheikh, “Planting Seeds/The Fires of War,” Third Text, 32:2-3, (2018): 205, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09528822.2018.1483899. Sheikh defines landraces as “domesticated, locally adapted, ‘traditional’ varieties of seeds cultivated over time to suit a natural and cultural environment.”

Image (above): Belkin Digital Screen. PHoto: Barbara Cole