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Director of LUX Scotland, Kitty Anderson, introduces the fourth and final online film pairing in the (Im)material worlds film programme

An introduction by Kitty Anderson

Listening in the Dark gathers a series of subtle but penetrating soundings of human beings’ impact on the natural environment. While there is a growing sensitivity to the ecological damage we are causing, we can also be strangely blind to things that happen outside of our consciousness. A creature that has often fallen beneath our radar is the bat. Undisturbed, and largely unchanged, for millions of years, its nocturnal rhythms are being increasingly interrupted by the presence of wind turbines. Taking the interaction between bats and wind turbines as its starting point, the film traverses geological, ecological and human time spans to navigate the complexity of the Anthropocene. As Nicholas Helm-Grovas has said of the film: Rather than hierarchical structures and instrumental reason, a different potential in science is highlighted in Listening in the Dark: patient, rigorous but flexible, ambitious but humble, tracing interactions between a multiplicity of actors in all their unexpected directions, learning from and with nature rather than dominating it.’ ---------- Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker based in London.&nbsp;She is the current Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow (2019-22) and is participating in British Art Show 9. Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and OUTPOST, Norwich. Her films have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Shorts), Sheffield Doc Fest and FILMADRID (Official Competition 2018). Brennan was a fellow of Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013 -14) and was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018 and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award 2021.

Listening in the Dark by Maeve Brennan

Listening in the Dark gathers a series of subtle but penetrating soundings of human beings’ impact on the natural environment.

Set in the Central Highlands of Vietnam where a large concentration of groups of indigenous people live, How to Improve the World is a film about listening. The film reflects on the differences in how memory is processed between the culture of the eye and that of the ear, while observing the loss of land, forests, and the way of life of the indigenous people in this part of the world.&nbsp;‘Do you trust sounds or images better?’ Nguyễn, off screen, asks her daughter, who replies ‘images, mum’. Of the cultural dominance of images and looking at the expense of other sensory modes, Nguyen has said: ‘As our globalised and westernised cultures have come to be dominated by visual media, I feel the need and responsibility as a filmmaker to resist this narrative power of the visual imagery, and look for a more balanced and sensitive approach in perceiving the world by paying more attention to aural landscapes, in line with my interests in the unknown, the invisible, the inaccessible, and in potentialities’.&nbsp; ---------- Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based experimental filmmaker and moving image / media artist whose practice over the last 10 years has consistently engaged with the history and memory of Vietnam, and with ways to connect the moving image with sound practices, performance and alternative forms of story-telling. Her practice currently explores the power of sound and listening, and the multiple relations between image, sound, and space, with ongoing interests in memory, representation, landscape, indigeneity, and ecology. Her works have been shown at Berwick Film Festival; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Biennale Jogja XV, Yogyakarta; 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane; 21st Biennale of Sydney; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; 13th Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial, Taichung; 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale; 4th Singapore Biennale, and 15th Jakarta Biennale.&nbsp;Nguyen is also founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and the moving image art in Hanoi since 2009. In 2022, she will participate in documenta (15) in Kassel, Germany.&nbsp;

How to Improve the World by Nguyễn Trinh Thi

Set in the Central Highlands of Vietnam where a large concentration of groups of indigenous people live, How to Improve the World is a film about listening.

Watch the recording of Maeve Brennan &amp; Nguyễn Trinh Thi's live online conversation. English subtitles will be available soon.

Recording: Maeve Brennan & Nguyễn Trinh Thi in conversation, hosted by LUX Scotland, Sat 19 March

Watch the recording of Maeve Brennan & Nguyễn Trinh Thi's live online conversation

Maeve Brennan and Nguyễn Trinh Thi in conversation

Join us for a live conversation and Q&A with the filmmakers, hosted by LUX Scotland

Listening in the Dark (2018, Maeve Brennan) & How to Improve the World (2021, Nguyễn Trinh Thi)

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 '(Im)material worlds' is an artists moving image programme that gives focus to the environmental crisis from Global South and postcolonial perspectives. It brings together recent and new moving image work by four Southeast Asian and four UK-based artists and filmmakers, who use experimental and essayistic forms to explore communities, habitats and places through their colonial, political, military and environmental histories. With paired online screenings and hosted dialogues with the filmmakers, the programme will unfold over eight weeks in February and March 2022.