This screening program curated by Sanneke Huisman is part of the Media Arts Festival Arnhem (MAFA), which will take place from March 22 to 24, 2024. A festival with film programs, lectures, performances, experiments, workshops and conversations with artists in Focus Filmtheater, around the theme ‘LESS’. Part of the festival is a two-week exhibition in Museum Arnhem, also in March 2024.

MAFA is a collaboration between Focus Filmtheater, Museum Arnhem and ArtEZ Academy for Art & Design. 

This program presents a selection of works in which artists reflect on the past, present and future of the natural environment, and human’s relationship to animals, plants and other life forms. They confront the viewer with the decline in biodiversity and relate this to technology. In Digital Landscapes, technological and cultural resources are not presented as a cause or a solution, but as an instrument to visualise the past – and speculate about the future of our environment. How to live in a world with digital trees and plastic mushrooms?

Curator Sanneke Huisman will introduce the screening.

Yuri Yefanov – We will definitely talk about this after the last air raid alert stops (UA, 2024, 16 min)
Deniz Tortum & Kathryn Hamilton – OUR ARK (NL, 2021, 12 min)
Broersen & Lukács – Forest on Location (NL, 2019, 12 min)

Yuri Yefanov, We will definitely talk about this after the last air raid alert stops
This film by Yuri Yefanov is set in a post-war city where humanity strives for harmony with nature through a recultivation programme. Yefanov created this city in a video game environment, which gave him endless possibilities to imagine a new future. The film shows a society in which collectivity and cooperation between life forms are central, whether they are people, trees, rivers or mushrooms. The cinematic journey is full of post-war resilience, cultural shifts and ecological challenges, envisioning a new world without exploitation. Ukrainian artist and filmmaker Yefanov made this film during the war in his home country.

Deniz Tortum & Kathryn Hamilton, OUR ARK
Is it possible to digitally recreate and preserve the world we live in? OUR ARK is an essay film about human efforts to create a virtual replica of the real world. Computers and computing power are used to create 3D models of animals, rainforests, cities and people. There is something bitter about this urge to archive. Can ecological disasters be prevented if a digital Noah’s Ark is created full of animals and objects?

​​Broersen & Lukács, Forest on Location
The artist duo Broersen and Lukács made a digital replica of the Bialowieza primeval forest in Poland, one of the oldest forests in Europe. Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen created a digital ‘back-up’ of the disappearing forest. They used photogrammetry, a technique in which photo documentation is converted into a three-dimensional digital environment. The viewer enters a fairytale forest, which slowly falls apart during the film. Fragments of trees, plants and a human figure float through the digital space. The Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani wanders through this virtual forest. He sings a Persian version of Nature Boy, following Nat King Cole’s hit that originated in Bialowieza.