The Place Where You Are

It feels like I am lucid dreaming.

Images come together, frantic and quick, and then stilled and slow, to form scenes that operate out of sync with time and space, yet are somehow still recognizable. What makes a place feel familiar, or foreign? What happens to the senses when they undergo a change in weather, a shift in space? Does grass smell different here? What about the quality of light at a particular longitude, the way humidity envelopes the body, how arid soil feels underfoot, the gathering speed of breeze becoming wind?

The films of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko are like such dreams. How we experience the nuances of place has so much to do with how we narrate our experiences back to ourselves. There are the smells, sounds, and tastes, but also recurring images, memories that flash up before the eyes, déjà vu: all the ways that a lifetime of half-remembered details coalesce to form an impression of place. Icons might be used for formal place-making—buildings, streets, monuments, animals, plants, and geologic features often define our surroundings—but so often it’s the minor stories we tell, are told, that define where we are.

This is how I’ve come to think about the collective work of Parastoo, Faraz, and Ryan. As artists and documentarians, their research-based films and installations offer unique approaches to the storying of a place. Whether viewed in the gallery, at the cinema, or online, their projects undertake perpetual, ongoing translation as they define and redefine aspects of the sites and histories they encounter. None are told straight—as though a place or time ever could be accurately narrated through a linear representation of events. Instead, their collective work uses fragments to question what it means to be in relation to a place. 

Their fragmented narratives may stretch truth into abstraction, but they never lose sight of the specific details that make a place distinct; in fact, just the opposite. Their collaborative, process-based methods, which deploy sound and motion to collage together scenes from a verité style of shooting, allow the artists to maintain a fidelity to the places they research and shoot, terrains as varied as northern Ontario, Berlin, Taiwan, and the province of Gilan in northern Iran. The aesthetics vary from work to work, but their parsing of idiosyncratic histories through accumulated materials—prints, photographs, flyers, posters, scripts, official and unofficial records, documents of all sorts—remains consistent. The methods border on fantastical or speculative research—after all, documents and archives are themselves a kind of imaginary—but their process is ultimately about experimenting with contemporary technologies of image production. The artists often work within a unique kind of collaboration where sets of self-imposed rules or scripts dictate the kinds of images they construct and how they respond to and relate to each other’s ideas visually. 

For example, for their project PATH (2015) for Nuit Blanche (Montreal), the three each set out from different points in an underground path network and assigned themselves the task of taking images every ten minutes until they found each other. For Live Feed, a workshop organized at WUFF, they expanded their collaboration to include festival participants, inviting them to collectively view and narrate live CCTV footage drawn from across the web and the world. Participants simultaneously annotated the CCTV “scenes” with their own observations, ideas, and speculations in the Zoom chat to produce a kind of script for a film whose figures will never interact. The material produced through the endless voyeurism of the internet offered another take on verité cinema. It’s their unique process and approach that makes Parastoo, Faraz, and Ryan’s collective work so highly legible to our time, as images and memes are administered in increasingly haptic and chaotic ways, and as media narratives remain so strongly controlled by algorithms that predict and produce the visual culture we encounter with such unrelenting force.

In their most recent film, Surface Rites (2022), the methods they’ve evolved through a decade of collaboration are most refined. Ostensibly about a region in northern Ontario where a uranium mine has polluted the rivers and lakes around the Serpent River First Nation and Elliot Lake, the work is also a multifaceted story about the region’s inhabitants. Among them are the teenagers or twentysomethings who imagine a zombie future emerging from the radiated terrain of their home, told through an old film script and comic storyboard. There are also the more mundane preoccupations of rural life, told through rituals of spirituality and labour; a massive church, only partly built, is one of many that dot the map of this obviously faithful place. Elaborate rituals of a different sort are apparent through the discussion of Holstein cows: what they cost, what makes them elite, what makes these animals prize-worthy. In one of the more dream-like scenes, we see hands trading and caressing rocks; it’s one of many intimate, minor gestures that accrete, connecting the lives of prospectors (those “wild men in the woods chipping away at rocks”) with the literal and symbolic power of the atomic. Without making it overt, the threat of nuclear energy and nuclear radiation permeates the endless metaphors of the atom: life and death, rebirth and renewal, unfathomable time scales, infinitesimal divisions, ritualistic worship, and fear of the invisible. 

The title, too, plays in this realm between conscious and unconscious knowledge. “Surface rights” is legal terminology denoting how much of one’s property one owns beneath the skin of the earth’s surface. Here, surface rights are also rites, and the legal extraction of minerals below the surface is conflated with the rites of religious rituals depicted in church interiors. It brings to mind the last rites administered to the terminally ill, as though we are witnessing a ritual administration to a dying part of the earth. In the context of the region’s Indigenous citizens, the term takes on the impossible irony of owning something stolen, along with the rites, rituals, and rights associated with the land. 

All the works in The word island is a bird inside of a mountain, are investigations of place, but without the specifics of narrative storytelling, they are also modes of translation, a kind of psychic transportation. Viewing films online reminds me of the early promise of the internet, of shared digital space, and of the idea that these spaces could be democratic, public, open to all, free. During the pandemic, film festivals were uniquely positioned to serve audiences through live-streaming; that promise feels somewhat renewed. Of course, it also seems somewhat naïve, but there is still something special about experiencing a place beyond the place where you are. That’s also a unique quality of film, and as image circulation speeds to ever new heights, the slow looking of film, even/especially when viewed online, adds something to our experiences of the places from which we watch. Parastoo, Faraz, and Ryan’s films function like radio antennae, attuning us to a different set of frequencies after which our surroundings, our own place in the world, can’t quite feel the same. These works aren’t fictions, but neither are they documents; like waking dreams, they lie somewhere in between. 

Feature image: Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Surface Rites, 2021, film still, courtesy of the artists.

Image description: An arm covered in dark red clothing enters the frame from the left. Their hand, centred, with palm facing in, holds up a dark grey rock. Just below the hand, a second rock sits at the bottom of the frame, appearing to almost float in the air because of the tight framing. As Wilkinson describes this moment in the film: “In one of the more dream-like scenes, we see hands trading and caressing rocks.” 

The Winnipeg Underground Film Festival is an annual showcase for contemporary experimental film and video in Winnipeg, Manitoba on Treaty 1 Territory. This year it ran in hybrid form (both online and off) from May 27-29, 2022.

Jayne Wilkinson is an art writer and editor whose work blends research into environmental politics, surveillance, and the elemental cultures of the Anthropocene, with a focus on contemporary art and photo-based practices. She writes essays and art criticism for publications including art-agenda, Artforum, BlackFlash, C Magazine, Momus, Inuit Art Quarterly, and others. From 2019 to 2021, she was Editor-in-Chief at Canadian Art, where she brought a range of new artists and voices to the platform. Prior to joining Canadian Art, she served as Editor/Publisher at Prefix Photo and Director/Curator at Prefix ICA, oversaw publications and public programs as Assistant Curator at the Blackwood Gallery, and coordinated touring exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She is currently a Lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.