erika is a movement artist
& experimental film maker
currently living on earth.
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erika is a movement artist
& experimental film maker
currently living on earth.
<<< INDEX >>>
OVERTURE B (2025)
6 minutes 36 seconds
digitized Super 8 film, sound
WATCH OVERTURE B >
movement by Lynnea Holland-Weiss
sound: Sound Bath 2.0 by unknown artist
directed, filmed and edited by erika roos / earthfruit
This film features text from "How Fossils Form" by the National Park Service.
OVERTURE is originally shot on Super 8 film, hand-processed in the darkroom, hand-scanned into digital format, and edited and presented digitally.
This work has emerged in two forms: OVERTURE A and OVERTURE B.
B has emerged as an iteration of A; a relative from the future.
Each film is a meditation on interspecies relationships; on how we touch and move (with) one another. Each film is also a reflection on disintegration and loss. As images are layered, they become less legible, even when their original form is retained underneath. Here I am thinking about sedimentation, and the way bodily impressions, like fossils, are both lost and preserved through processes of decay and decomposition.
OVERTURE B
On the one hand, I call this series Overture because it is an opening.
This second cut, OVERTURE (B), explores erosion, sedimentation, disintegration. It begins with one loop, moving forward, shown as positive images. In the next round, there is a second layer superimposed, but parts are cut off; lost. With sedimentation comes loss of information, missing time, gaps in the record. With every cycle, there is repetition and recall, but there is decay. Gradually, the composite image becomes more and more distorted: harder to see, contradicting the idea that repetition induces familiarity. Sometimes matter decomposes beyond recognition, becomes something new.
The sound is Sound Bath 2.0 by an unknown artist recorded at an art and science center near Joshua Tree, called Integratron. This is a found track; one I stumbled upon. A track located at a place that considers integration, to counterbalance the images that deal with disintegration. Wholeness in the loss.
This work asks: how is movement fossilized? Can movement be fossilized? Fossilization suggests fixedness, but it is actually a process of transformation, ever changing.
OVERTURE (B) contends with the material, ecological, and alchemical processes of fossilization and sedimentation. It considers the way images both harden and degrades over time, as new materials are layered.
There is touch. The film is imperfect. The cuts are abrupt. There are evident light leaks. The materiality of the film is important to the work. The image is diminished, brought down in scale, to reflect the ways in which the odds of an individual organism becoming a fossil are quite small. to reflect the relative smallness of a single life.
But small does not mean insignificant.
The film is hand processed, in a condition that is unpredictable and not without imprecision. The film is vulnerable, subject to conditions that weather and mark it; conditions that reduce the fidelity of the images and forms they hold. Paralleling fossilization, the film is exposed to elements that change its appearance, its materiality, and the way it is perceived and experienced. Within the process of preservation, there is loss.
In OVERTURE B, the images are interspersed with more text about fossilization. The text posits that individual organisms are relatively unlikely to be preserved as fossils, but the collective fossils of life that is preserved is important for creating a record of life on Earth. Through the film, the text moves. It oscillates forwards and backwards. It appears, disappears, and reappears. It moves from the center of the image - itself becoming an overlay - to sitting below the images. Arhythmic in pace, and with the occasional error, the text appears to be written by a person, offering a sense of intimacy and subjectivity embedded within what is taken to be scientific information.