We at aemi are delighted to share some information on a forthcoming screening of Graeme Arnfield’s Shouting at the Ground (21 mins), 2017. Graeme will introduce his film followed by an introduction and post-screening Q+A with aemi Co-Director & Film Curator Alice Butler.
In a peat bog in North West England a Spanish woman was murdered, her body buried and subsumed into the treacherously dense ecological matter. A matter which labours have extracted for centuries, selling this fertile material as fuel worldwide; a material which upon burning releases timeless carbon deposits into our increasingly precarious and damaged ecosphere. After laying dormant under the rich dark peat for an unknown amount of time a body returned to the surface but its identity had become dislocated; it has become entwined with the history of its material host.
Taking the real life disappearance of Malika Maria De Fernandez along with the global trade of fossil fuels as an poignant opening, “Shouting at the Ground” is an agricultural & archaeological murder mystery circling around a void, oscillating it’s images and sounds between states of violent networked embodiment and pitch black absence, of burial and exhumation.
This screening is in association with La Grande Illusion, the solo exhibition of work by artist Brian Maguire (3 October 2024 – 23 March 2025). ‘The ruined land: the land in ruins’, is a programme of films curated by film curator Alice Butler in parallel to the Brian Maguire exhibition ‘La Grande Illusion’.
Free, book on Eventbrite or come on the day subject to availability.
Graeme Arnfield will also lead a workshop for aemi’s Tier 2 participants on Thursday 9th January at the Arts Technology Research Laboratory (ATRL) at Trinity College Dublin; focused on strategies for navigating YouTube as source material for making work and as a way of thinking. The session will open with a short discussion of Arnfield’s recent films, unpicking his use of found material and approach to threading his own stories into others’ material. Please note that places on this workshop were limited to aemi’s Tier 2 participants and it is now fully booked.
Graeme Arnfield (b. 1991, UK) is an artist filmmaker and composer living in London, raised in Cheshire, UK. Producing sensory essay films from networked imagery his films use methods of investigative storytelling to explore issues of technology, ecology and history. Research topics have included: the politics of digital networks, the distribution of ecological matter such as peat and asbestos and the adaptive circulation of global and local histories. His work has been presented worldwide including Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Dokufest, Sonic Acts Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Transmediale, IMPAKT Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, Fantasia Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Cripta747, Berlinische Gallerie, Signal Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and on e-flux & Vdrome. He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University. His work is distributed by LUX, Arsenal and Square Eyes.
Still from: Shouting at the Ground (21 mins), 2017; by Graeme Arnfield