The single-channel documentary fiction film “Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood” presents a speculative narrative of maritime and epidemiological movement across oceanic space and time. The film is grounded by documentary footage shot in Albion and Flat Island, Mauritius, combined with a fictional layer of computer-generated animation. “Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood” is narrated through the perspective of the Paille-en-queue bird, who has inherited oral histories from their ancestors of all they have witnessed from an aerial perspective. Spanning different elevations and time registers, stories from an unmarked cemetery on a former cotton plantation and sugar estate in Albion, as well as 19th-century quarantine station Flat Island question erased histories from the legacy of British and French colonialism and movements of indentured labour across the Afrasian Sea (Indian Ocean). By locating these deep erasures through fiction, the film offers alternate readings of the terrain through their material imprints and geological scars in order to tell these difficult stories of disappearance and bondage as quiet acts of commemoration.
Biography
Clara Jo (Berlin) is a graduate of Bard College (NY) and the Universität der Künste Berlin. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Gropius Bau (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Jeu de Paume (Paris), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill On Sea), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), ARKO Art Center (Seoul), Spike Island (Bristol), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), and Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst (Oldenburg). She has previously held fellowships and residencies at Art Explora (Paris), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (USA).
