Elke Marhöfer
2021Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass)
Elke Marhöfer
The two concepts of extinction and becoming are difficult to think together, both are more than just a metaphor and none of them offers an easy way out. Tossing more species to the margins increasingly faster, extinction highlights the extraordinary level of disturbance and precarity that the bonding of science and capitalism has imposed on our and other species. Most creatures and places of the earth have been measured, consumed, exhausted, infected, eliminated, and otherwise killed. Becoming adds an affective dimension to our relation with the environment and helps to grasp the disappearance of species, not only as destructive and final, but as transitory. Becoming-with-the-dead mobilizes our imagination for a future life without reconciliation or a place to hide.
Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass)
Who Does The Earth Think It Is (Becoming Fire)
Elke Marhöfer
Following my dog, this writing begins in our charred orchard in Sicily after a wildfire. It being summer, fires ignite—and not just by themselves. From my childhood I remember my father discussing with other farmers the best time to burn their fields after the harvest. They would wait for the right humidity and a good wind, careful not to let the fire pass over to other fields. Then suddenly fire was banned. The smoke, emitting natural aerosols, was considered an air pollutant and a health hazard. Meanwhile, agricultural machinery, lorries, cars, aircrafts, power plants, heating and cooling systems, all burning fossil fuels, were considered unproblematic. By the end of the 1980s, the agricultural practice of burning fields on a landscape scale had disappeared completely from the West German countryside...
Who Does The Earth Think It Is (Becoming Fire)
prendas — ngangas — enquisos — machines {each part welcomes the other without saying}
Elke Marhöfer
The film prendas — ngangas — enquisos — machines addresses the question of how we can reconnect the more-than-human with the historical, specifically the post colonial space, without deepening violations already inflicted on both humans and nonhumans?
prendas — ngangas — enquisos — machines {each part welcomes the other without saying}
Fragmented Forest
Elke Marhöfer
Fragmented forest is the term for a “former rainforest” that is cut down in a manner that leaves behind small, isolated patches of forest. These small islands become sites for ecological research on biodiversity, they become park for leisure, or they become rubber tree plantations. Filmed in Xishuangbanna in the Southeast of China on the border to Laos and Mynarmar, a tree was worshiped by the inhabitants and the visitors (plantation workers, farmers, lumberjacks, cleaners, tourists, ecologists) alike. Testing a “speculative camera”, it stays unclear what is at issue: the plants, the light, the shadow and the plastic pieces of the worshiped tree become inseparabel. Every image becomes a thing and the things become images.
Fragmented Forest
Is There Something Else I’ve Lost?
Elke Marhöfer
In Is there something else I’ve lost? the camera does not function as an instrument that illustrates a narrative. Instead, this film is a portrait of a character. The reality of this character is organized both through the camera movements and the editing process. However, who or what is “I” mentioned in the title?
Is There Something Else I’ve Lost?
Nobody knows, when it was made and why
Elke Marhöfer
The film Nobody knows, when it was made and why features the Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg located in the Warburg Institute in London. The film examins the question, if the long-lasting resilience of the Atlas is stemming from geographically dispersed origins and the unresolved, indefinite temporality of its images?
Nobody knows, when it was made and why
No, I am Not a Toad, I am a Turtle!
Elke Marhöfer
Elke Marhöfer's observational essay takes its title from a Korean Pansori song. One of three musical interludes performed in the film, this song tells the story of a turtle locked in a futile circle of evasion with a hungry tiger. Marhöfer's film is concerned with the formal attributes of Pansori music – its traditions of storytelling and the transmittance of an alternative knowledge. The film journeys through natural landscapes, small town streets, forested mountains and busy shipping channels as it looks at the divide between the traditional and the modern. Shot in 16mm, this measured and lyrical film is an exploration into the boundaries between humans, animals and things.
No, I am Not a Toad, I am a Turtle!
Primate Colors
Elke Marhöfer
The film Primate Colors pursues and accelerates methods and forms elaborated in ethnographic and anthropological filmmaking. The anthropological understanding of following subjects to record their lives is re-oriented. Rather than (critically) explaining the actions, believes or norms of certain subjects, the film concentrates on the affective components of events, objects and actions. (No claims are made about the lives of others.) Here, filming is to follow affects and to produce further affects. To follow affects, does not mean to be affected by an idea or a subject, but to be mesmerized by materiality, by the sounds of the running camera and by following the movement of things that are being filmed.
Primate Colors
Soils-Habit-Plants
Elke Marhöfer, Mikhail Lylov
In the Soils-Habit-Plants the camera attempts a transformation, which will enable the viewer to observe details of three vegetative protagonists and their environments. The objective is to discover the plants’ habits and document how they contract themselves with the elements of soil, water and air. This intimate and immediate observation is interrupted by the two reference-images: a historical photograph and results of the soils conditions’ laboratory test. This interstice insists on a narrative dimension of the observed environments.
Soils-Habit-Plants
Shape Shifting
Elke Marhöfer, Mikhail Lylov
We shot the film last year in Japan. It is a cartography of a particular landscape. This landscape can be found in many parts of Asia, in Japan it is called “satoyama”, literally meaning space between village and mountain. Satoyama is a membrane constructed by exchanges and encounters between non-human and human life. The agricultural and forestry productivity of this landscape is based on the increase of biodiversity. The more collaborations between species and cycles of materials are created — the more stable ecosystems and films can be formed.
Shape Shifting
