New Worlders /
Do Novo Mondo
5 channel video installation /
Short Film - 30 mins
2022
Prospects and Concepts, Art Rotterdam, 2022
With the support of Mondriaan Fonds
An experimental nonlinear sci-fi story around the past and future of rubber where history and fantasy mingle. A young researcher retraces the steps of her (my) aunt Maria Reznik, who in 1943 became one of the first white women to explore the South Amazon by joining expedition Roncador-Xingu. Along the way, the researcher encounters a political movement that sees opportunity in the imminent collapse of the new gene-edited rubber industry, not a catastrophe. A mutant fungus known for attacking rubber plantations becomes an ally. Riverine creatures (human, nonhuman and the narrative) are affected by its sexual spores, which not only kill but also regenerate.
Would ensuring the fungus prevails (with the risk of it expanding globally) allow for a less intensive but more distributed mode of production? Can we develop a fungal cosmology, a non linear view of reality, in which non-humans are considered agents, where life and death coexist as opposed to eternal growth dystopia?
Maria traveled through the South of Brazil some years after the father of biopiracy managed to smuggle 70.000 rubber tree seeds to British and Dutch colonies in SouthEast Asia. It is only a matter of time until this fungus manages to infect South East Asian plantations, nowadays home to 93% of global rubber production, where the fungus does not exist. Strict isolation protocols are in place, which could be broken either by mistake, advancements in technology or an act of bioterrorism. What could happen after such a catastrophic event (as all these scientists and papers online name it)? Perhaps a less intensive, more distributed mode of global production of rubber could emerge. Certainly not without a sacrifice.
New Worlders - Trailer
“New Worlders” points at the nickname colonisers gave to Americans, but also to the capacity to build new worlds. The young researcher, a Jewish Argentinian woman living in the near future, wonders about what took her aunt to the unknown. Through a fictional journey that takes responsibility for the obsession of "the West" about penetrating the so called virgin Amazon, she delves into the sexualised and violent narratives that haunt our imagination about that place: like worms in the skulls of the dead, like dreams in the minds of the living. This film is an attempt to create a different way of telling this story, by presenting a research based speculative near-future sci-fi story about the history and future of rubber, a hidden backbone of the global economy, much at the edge of collapse due to, in part, an unruly fungus. It concerns biopiracy in times of genetic engineering, the scope of synthetic fantasies, global production chains of supply, ecology, scientific innovation and resistance.
Producer, Writer and Director: Flora Reznik
3d Artist: Martin Menso
Camera: Ariela Bergman and Jesse Bom
Sound recording and sound post producer: Jorrit van Rijn
Editor and image post producer: Flora Reznik
Voice: Anne La Berge
Performers: Yun Lee, Tommy Ventevogel, Elen Braga, Mano Daniel Szollosi and Vera Goetzee
Music: Tomer Baruch / Trumpet: Tal Avraham
With the support of: Mondriaan Fonds