APHOTIC ZONE EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ – Fondazione In Between Art Film

APHOTIC ZONE

2022, single-channel video, 4K, color, 5.1 sound, 16’

Courtesy of the artist, Dr. Erik Cordes and the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition “Penumbra,” 21/04/2022 – 27/11/2022, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice

EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ

The immersive films and installations of Emilija Škarnulytė (1987, Lithuania) reposition the scopes of human knowledge and the interpretation of the world within a much larger spatio-temporal scale.

As a cinematic journey across the ocean’s abysses, Aphotic Zone echolocates the mythological as much as the critical aspects of humanity’s avarice in its, albeit brief, stay on Earth.
It crosses a trench at 4 km depth to reach the pitch black (or, aphotic) zone of the Pacific seamounts of Costa Rica on the other side. The only visible lights beam from strange, bioluminescent creatures in its inky depths. A Remotely Operated Vehicle samples deep-sea corals with its robotic arms while images of the undulating seafloor generated from 3D laser scanner data as well as of the towering Duga radar (a Soviet-era missile defense system near Chernobyl, Ukraine) shift and scale into a landscape of prehistoric creatures and advanced technology. Here, more-than-human and machinic agencies weirdly coexist with the sonic memory of a distant civilization: mixed by Oscar-winning engineers Jaime Baksht and Michelle Couttolenc, the sound was recorded in Mexico City’s main plaza during the commemorations for the 500th anniversary of Spain’s bloody conquest of Tenochtitlan. The former capital of the Aztec Empire becomes a sonic ghost reverberating with the contemporary destructions of societies and ecosystems.
Oscillating between the documentary and the oneiric, Aphotic Zone imagines the future as its vantage point with the aim of looking back into the present amid the threats of the climate crisis and economic extractivism; the idealistic prospects of science; and what will survive the ravages of human greed.