FORDLANDIA, video by Melanie Smith (Brazil / Mexico)

30min – HD – color – quadraphonic (4.0)
Artist: Melanie Smith
Sound Recording: Raul Locatelli
Sound Editing & Mixing: Félix Blume
DOP: Julien Devaux
Editing: Alfonso Cornejo

Fordlandia is a small settlement on the River Tapajos in the Brazilian part of the Amazon, where Henry Ford set up a rubber industry in the 1920’s. Mainly due to the resistance of nature the project failed and was abandoned some twenty years later. The film “Fordlandia” is a voyage of (de)colonization whereby the drifts and detours of modernity in uncertain places are highlighted, turning away from whatever their historical imaginaries were. The tensions between industrial and natural landscape are leveled off in a certain horizontality of hierarchies between form and content, and at the same time the animal resignifies possibilities the community of the living.

EXHIBTIONS: MK Gallery (UK), Nara Roesler (Br), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Nl), Contemporary Art Centre of Vilnius (Lithuania), Sicardi Gallery (Houston, Texas)