No Before or After: Notes on a Film

synopsis

Deep in the Arctic permafrost lies humanity’s collective memory. A global memory bank is housed in an abandoned coal mine on Svalbard, three hundred metres below the surface. This intimate, hypnotic audiovisual essay reflects on humanity’s attempt to defy its own transience. Amid a monumental landscape of ice, chillingly desolate and melancholically endless, physical and digital records of human existence await discovery a thousand years from now. By then, we may no longer be here. The film forms part of a project that also includes a web app and presents the landscape as an archive or an intermedial map of texts, images, knowledge and ideas.

“The Arctic contains archetypes that are a way of understanding the narrative of change on a planetary scale.”

biography

Emily Richardson (1971) is a British filmmaker and researcher whose work moves between experimental film and the film essay. She focuses on traces of human presence in the landscape, exploring sites such as oil rigs in Petrolia (2005), an abandoned military base in Cobra Mist (2008), which screened at Ji.hlava IDFF, and a nuclear power station in Immaterial Terrain (2023).

film details

director:	Emily Richardson
producer:	Emily Richardson
script:	Emily Richardson
sound:	Chris Watson

contact

Emily Richardson emily.rich@mac.com