Origins of Colonialism # - a New Experimental Film

Over the last eighteen months I have been steadily accumulating 'footage' for a new series of experimental poem-films. This is the first and was filmed in at various locations in Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia.

'Origins of Colonialism #' is a demi-silent film... there is sound, and the jackhammering is intrusive/interruptive, a motif of terror, but a conceptual silence also underpins the whole: the silence of a world still largely and materially in denial of collapsing eco-systems, and also the silence around confronting the causes of ongoing colonialism (one of the major reasons we have got to the point of collapse). Paths laid down over other paths, the labyrinth that cannot be 'solved', and the 'pre-evidence' (out of precedent) of our own footsteps to come as we follow the tracks of modernity laid down over the ley lines of deeper presences. And always looming, the markers of mining wealth and power. 

This new series connects to my earlier Rental Crisis films (see Rental Crisis 3 here), which I briefly discuss in an earlier blog entry. The lurid 'neon light' motif recurs and intensifies.

    John Kinsella

Experimental Film 3 — Max Planck subset

This film is also part of a series of poem-films I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. As mentioned in the prior posting, these films are subsections of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, AI, animal rights, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'. 

This 'section' arose out of living near the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (oh, the irony!), and investigating the vivisection that ultimately underpins so much Max Planck laboratory research (by varying degrees of separation, or not). Via The German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) website, see. 

Recently, I wrote to one prominent university neuroscientist to object to his inserting electrodes into crows' brains to 'show conscious processes in bird brains'. And though there's been a relatively recent shift in the use/abuse of primates by the Max Planck research facilities (I wrote protest-intervention poems about this horrendous abuse when I was in Tübingen in 2016), the disregard for non-human life goes deep (always 'justified' as being for the ultimate benefit of 'humankind', while disclaiming the suffering of the animals themselves through deploying hierarchical and abusive/demeaning speciesist arguments). For a deeply disturbing article regarding the lengths vivisectors will go to to keep their death programmes functioning, see this. 

There's also a figurative (and literal via the observatory dome which is almost the omphalos of the institute) astronomical subtext... when I was a child, I wanted to be an astronomer... as the power plant in the 'background' spews waste. The underlying 'soundtrack' or 'voice-under' is Emily Brontë's poem 'No Coward Soul is Mine'.

    John Kinsella