T A P E Collective presents ‘Free to Forage’, a showcase of work by mixed heritage creative practitioners reconnecting with nature and its intersection with social justice, co-curated with moving image artist Reman Sadani.
Funded by Arts Council England, the ‘Free to Forage’ programme collaborates with and highlights cultural producers, whose work shifts our attention to nature to address colonial legacies, diasporic experiences, land and environmental justice.
The programme explores moving image and short film work which delves into questions of reclaiming nature, belonging, and healing the severed relationships between living beings.
This showreel of three short films features work by April Lin, Leena Habiballa, and Dan Guthrie. The films are available via our website homepage from March 25 to April 22.
Access: All films are available with captions, the total run time is 21.25 minutes.
Find out more about the artists:
April Lin 林森Open accordion
In collaboration with ecologist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, artist-filmmaker April Lin 林森 presents ‘TR333’, a speculative documentary which imagines a new species of tree based on scientific literature on plants and climate hardiness. Their hybrid forms and body parts a patchwork amalgamation of different tree types, this tree is a climate adaptative response, a lifeform born out of resilience and hope. As the spirit inhabiting the tree emerges to converse with the viewer, they share with us their experiences of ecocidal generational trauma, urging us to reflect around the ways all the beings on the planet are deeply interlinked, and to honour our collective responsibility towards one another. Using a blend of 3D animation, found footage, and a musical score based on data sonification, ‘TR333’ uses the speculative to recast the ecological crisis, asking ‘Why is this important?’ from a multispecies and affective gaze.
Commissioned by Sheffield DocFest and supported by Wellcome.
April Lin 林森 is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. Working across moving image, performance, creative computing and installation, they dream & explore & critique & fret & catastrophise & imagine & play — for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examination of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery.
Leena HabiballaOpen accordion
Dead As A Dodo (2022) lays bare the settler colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the Dodo’s extinction. By drawing on archival material and the Dodo’s apparition the film performs a sensory haunting, reviving the spaces between life and death that have been shaped by settler violence into a value-forming exercise. This work is inspired by and is in conversation with a book of poems titled ‘A Theory of Birds’ by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous.
Leena Habiballa is a cultural worker with an interest in visual/material cultures and community filmmaking/exhibition models. She explores these themes through art/film criticism, research, and her own filmmaking practice. She is currently Assistant Producer at Other Cinemas and a member of the artist workers’ cooperative not-nowhere
Dan GuthrieOpen accordion
Selected by Exeter Phoenix for their 2021 Artists’ Moving Image commission, Dan’s idea was to make a film about Blackness and belonging in the English countryside, taking a family photo of some of his relatives at the Gloucestershire viewpoint Coaley Peak as a starting point. Whilst making the film, something happened.
Dan Guthrie is an artist who often works with the moving image to explore representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness with an interest in examining how they manifest themselves in rural areas.