New Worlders (2022), Flora Reznik

She/her — AR/NL

Exhibition: Mutation
Wednesday 8 June till Sunday 19 June — Dokzaal

Opening | 17:00—23:00 (free admission)
Tue - Fri | 13:00—20:00
Sat & Sun | 10:00—20:00
Mon | closed

Now that we have crossed the threshold into an extremely unstable and hostile world due to a warming planet, wouldn't it be great to be able to start all over again? A livable future, full of possibilities, where we could start anew? But what if that world already existed before we explored it? The film New Worlders retells the story of human interference and the mutual effect nature and humans have on each other. In the film, fact and fiction is blurred. Artist Flora Reznik presents a research based speculative sci-fi story, in which personal explorations of family ties are interwoven with larger colonial histories, connected to processes like industrialization and global trade.

A young researcher, a Jewish Argentinian woman living in the near future, learns about her aunt being one of the firsts to explore the Amazon, and wonders about what took her to the unknown. Through a fictional journey, she delves into the sexualised and violent narratives that haunt our imagination about that place: like worms in the skulls of the dead, like dreams in the minds of the living. 

This film is an attempt to create a different narrative, by simultaneously telling the tale of the history and future of rubber, a hidden backbone of the global economy. The rubber industry is very much at the edge of collapse due to a mutant fungus that attacks rubber plantations. An interspecies alliance with this fungus might be a way to overcome gene-edited resistant rubber trees, and bring back the wild distribution of rubber trees, scattered across the landscape.   

New Worlders concerns biopiracy in times of genetic engineering, the scope of synthetic fantasies, global production chains of supply, ecology, scientific innovation and resistance. The title points at the nickname colonists gave to the indigenous Americans, but also to the capacity to build new worlds.