Marine Hugonnier

Screening of films Travelling Amazonia, The Last Tour, and Ariana by Marine Hugonnier which investigate geography and politics, followed by the artist in conversation.

Travelling Amazonia (2006) was shot on the Transamazonia road, a 2,500-miles long highway cutting through Brazil’s vast Amazonian region. The film centres on the artist’s attempt to construct an ideal straight line re-enacting that of the Transamazonia, a road which was carried out in the 1970s during Brazil’s military dictatorship as a route trying to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. Through the making of a “travelling shoot” that represents the illusion behind the idealism of the Transamazonia – now a line broken in holes failing to be mapped out – the film addresses the processes, rather than the pioneering ideas, that prevailed after the heyday of Brazil’s aspiration to become “the country of the future”.

The Last Tour (2004) takes as a point of departure the laws that increasingly regulate our access to and perception of nature in tourists’ visits to national parks. The viewer embarks on a last tour on a hot-air balloon flight over the iconic Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps, suggesting the possibility of a blank space re-appearing on the map, a reference to the world before the Era of Discovery.

Her 2003 film Ariana charts the journey of a western film crew to the Pandjsher Valley in the North East of Afghanistan to investigate how this unique landscape has determined its history. The film is the story of a failed project that prompts a process of reflection about the ‘panorama’ as a form of strategic overview.

This event is organised to accompany the Whose Map is it? exhibition. Nine artists provide individual insights that inscribe new, often omitted perspectives onto the map. From 2 June until 24 July 2010.