Festival ECRÃ
of Experimental and Art and Cinema
Mutātiōnem
Mutātiōnem
Maile Costa Colbert
Portugal
2021
Performance
Short Film
When the pandemic hit, I started writing again in pencil. I felt anxious until I could accept a fragmented interior with a hundred variations and versions, all in process—process over progress. Text, audio, visuals—both moving and still, compilations, complications, heading toward combobulations, if that’s what comes. This is a time capsule of fragments, reflecting a fragmented time. These fragments try to tell the story, to encourage a sense of what happened. Small works, notes, moments: my daughter at three, dappled light on her face through the window, lying on the floor looking at the camera screen facing her, a beautiful image that later makes me think of contagion. A voice recording recalling a dream I had when I was pregnant and trying to come to terms with my ecological guilt at bringing another consumerist life form into a world of overconsumption; a dream where I hatch a baby dragon that I knew was dangerous but loved and cared for nonetheless. The 2020 supermoon captured on yet another sleepless night, with an unnerving podcast by a celebrated epidemiologist playing in the background very quietly, my hand shaking with the sound, the image shaking with my hand. Images from the Apollo Moon mission - also making me think of contagion. The music I created in grief, from an archive of extinct and endangered birds and forest soundscapes. All together, somehow, trying to, and conveying, a sense of.
general information
edition
6th ECRÃ Festival
venues
16-24/07 - ONLINE
duration in min
10
premiere
Latin Premiere 6th ECRÃ Festival
indicative classification
L / Free for all audiences / Free for All Audiences
trailer/teaser/excerpt
content
-
tags
art, docufiction, ecology, science fiction, found footage, quarantine, sci-fi, sound, ecocinema, experimental
Maile Costa Colbert
Maile Costa Colbert is an intermedia artist, researcher, and educator focused on time-based media. She is currently a PhD student in Art Studies with an emphasis on Sound Studies, cinematic sound design, and its relationship with the ecology of the soundscape at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, through the Foundation for Science and Technology, and a visiting professor at ISMAI. Her current practice and research project is titled Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place (http://www.mailecolbert.com/proj-wayback.html), and asks what we can gather from sounding the past. She is a collaborator and Curator of the Digital Archive of the arts organization Binaural (www.binauralmedia.org), a member of CineLab, the research laboratory in film and philosophy at IFILNOVA (www.fcsh.unl.pt), and is an editor and author of Campo Sônico (http://sonicfield.org/author/mailecolbert/). She has exhibited, screened, and performed worldwide, including at the New York Film Festival, The Ear to Earth Festival for Electronic Music Foundation in New York, LACE Gallery in Los Angeles, MOMA New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Serralves em Festa in Porto, and the REDCAT Theatre in Los Angeles, among other venues. She has designed sound and composed for works such as the feature-length documentaries Yours in Sisterhood and The Motherhood Archives by Irene Lusztig, Rebecca Baron’s film How Little We Know of Our Neighbors, winner of the Black Maria Film Festival Best Film, Adele Horne’s documentary The Tailenders, broadcast on PBS POV and winner of the 2007 Independent Spirit Award, The American Sector by Courntey Stephens and Pacho Velez, and Allan Sekula’s epic The Lottery of the Sea. A website with work through 2014 and links to more recent work can be found at: www.mailecolbert.com
more information
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