Moving Off the Land II | Public Program
April 15 – 28, 2020 | www.vdrome.org

Video still from Erin Espelie’s 内共生 (Inside the Shared Life), 2017. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
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The COVID-19 crisis has forced us to struggle, veering between fear and hope, between moments of discouragement and desire for action as we question who we are and what makes our work meaningful. We at TBA21 are now, like many others, looking at options to work digitally, a response driven by the fact that we cannot imagine being unable to share moments together. We want to keep our commitments to curators and artists and believe that continued work may be the best possible form of resilience. We are currently exploring ways in which Joan Jonas’s exhibition “Moving Off the Land II” could remain a trigger of discussion and critical thinking. 

We begin this by showing works that were featured in “Love,” a film program of artists’ cinema that celebrates interspecies relationships and affects, curated by Filipa Ramos. We are looking to host the program, originally conceived in dialogue with Joan Jonas’s exhibition “Moving Off the Land II,” commissioned by TBA21–Academy and curated by Stefanie Hessler, at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, this Fall. In the meantime, due to the current closure of the museum, TBA21 and Vdrome are collaborating on a joint screening of Erin Espelie’s film "内共生 (Inside the Shared Life) (2017)," freely accessible on www.vdrome.org between April 15–28, 2020. 

In 1967, a young biologist re-wrote the history of life. “We are compound individuals,” declared unorthodox scientist Lynn Margulis, who argued that a multiplicity of life-forms existed and performed vital functions inside our own cells, acting like microscopic aliens. Margulis gave a name to this co-sharing by dissimilar organisms: endosymbiosis. Despite the fact it took some time for the scientific community to widely accept her ideas, they forever changed the ways in which life—its systems of organization and its logic of evolution—has been defined. 

Paying tribute to Margulis’s groundbreaking vision, artist Erin Espelie merges audio of the scientist’s radical ideas with outlandish sounds of oceanic creatures, like snapping shrimp, bearded seals, sperm whales. The result is a striking and mesmerizing short film that celebrates the diversity of life, the event of co-constitution, and the radical potential of biology.

"内共生 (Inside the Shared Life)" is introduced with a short conversation between Erin Espelie and theorist and writer Dorion Sagan, son of biologist Lynn Margulis and astronomer Carl Sagan. 
 
DATES
April 15–28, 2020 
About Erin Espelie
Erin Espelie is a filmmaker whose works have been shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Anthology Film Archive in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and more. Her writing has appeared in SciArt Magazine, Labocine, The Brooklyn Rail, High Country News, and Natural History magazine. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies & the Moving Image Arts and the Department of Critical Media Practices and Co-Director of NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder. 
About Dorion Sagan
Writer, theorist, philosopher, and artist Dorion Sagan is author or coauthor of twenty-five books translated into fifteen languages, including several with biologist Lynn Margulis on planetary biology and evolution by symbiosis. He has also worked with Eric D. Schneider to popularize the thermodynamics of life. A former student of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, his work has appeared in Natural History, Smithsonian magazine, Cabinet, Oberon, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. With his parents, Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, he is first author of the entries for both “Life” and “Extraterrestrial Life” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
About Filipa Ramos
Filipa Ramos is a Lisbon-born writer and lecturer based in London. She is Curator of Art Basel Film. Her research looks at human’s engagement with animals in the contexts of art and artists’ cinema. With Andrea Lissoni she founded and curates Vdrome, a programme of screenings of artists’ films. She is Lecturer at the MRes Arts at Central Saint Martins, London, and the Master Programme of the Arts Institute of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Basel. 
She curates the ongoing symposia series The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Lucia Pietroiusti for the Serpentine Galleries. 
About Vdrome
Vdrome is an online cinema that offers regular, high-quality screenings of films and videos directed by visual artists and filmmakers whose production lies between contemporary art and cinema. Films are selected for the importance of their content, artistic quality, and innovative strength. Most of the works Vdrome presents are only shown in the context of film festivals, exhibitions, and surveys, thus being otherwise of very limited access.