Leadership for the Ecozoic's Dandelions Screening Series Presents:

Who Does The Earth Think It Is (Becoming Fire) (2020)

A film by Elke Marhöfer

Runtime: 56 minutes

Location: Peterson Hall 108

Synopsis:

Who Does the Earth Think It Is? (Becoming Fire) explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and fire, specifically through the practices of swidden agriculture and charcoal making. Shot on 16mm film, the documentary examines how fire, through these practices and its role in the decomposition of organic matter and the release of minerals, fosters forest ecology and species diversity, rather than solely destroying it. The film also provides a comparative perspective between Japanese and European traditions of using fire in agriculture and landscape management. Today, in many parts of the world, human burning practices have been nearly extinguished and natural fires systematically suppressed, according to the notion that they damage nature. And it’s true, fire kills—certain trees and many organisms die in a fire. But fire also fosters ecology.

Bio:

Elke Marhöfer is an artist based in Berlin and Sicily. She investigates ecological practices that support human and nonhuman communities. She works with notions of self-admitted foreignness and radical othering. Linking, for example, the nonhuman with the postcolonial, she discusses how nature evokes situated testimonies of past and current events while simultaneously surpassing historical formatting, with its unique and machinic mode of constantly mutating into something new. She tests nonhuman perspectives, translating a technology like the camera from a human cultural and technical device into an environmentally intensive force.

Elke Marhöfer studied Fine Art at SAIC Chicago, & ISP Whitney Museum of American Art. She was awarded a PhD & a postdoctoral at the Kyoto University Japan. Her films were screened at the Flaherty NYC, Jeu de Paume Paris, Courtisane Ghent, Cinematek Brussels, Stockholm, Toronto & Tokyo, transmediale Berlin, BFI London, Berlinale Berlin, IFFR Rotterdam, Images Festival Toronto, Berlinische Galerie, Showroom London, Kyiv Biennale, Kaohsiung Taipei, Badischer Kunstverein, FCAC Shanghai, MFA Houston.