Traversing Landscapes

The Jameel is running a third season of Night School, a seminar programme where UAE residents can discuss urbanism and history in Dubai. Under this season’s theme, There You Are, participants will assess how much we can know about a place just by taking a good look around. The seminar itself is fully booked, but there are three public events in Art Jameel’s lobby; this is one of them.

Hind Mezaina curates five short films that respond to the Night School theme of sensing our whereabouts:

El Chinero, A Phantom Hill dir Bani Khoshnoudi (2022, 11 min) El Chinero is a rugged hill in the Baja California desert where many people are thought to have died while crossing the desert from mainland Mexico. Myth and identity, reality and fiction, ghosts and memory: a site of tragedy with no traces nor remnants to be seen. How can one fill this memory void with images and artefacts in an attempt to construct an archive where none exists?

Transitions dir Aurèle Ferrier (2017, 13 min) A journey from the civilising void of the desert to a maximal urban, capitalistic and hedonistic density, which in the case of Las Vegas assumes some bizarre expression.

The Unofficial Countryside dir Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan (2021, 17 min) An observational documentary on the ‘edgeland’ landscapes between the urban and the rural, where nature thrives on the fringes of the city in a landscape shaped by the activities and imprints of people passing through.

Blue Honda Civic dir Jussi Eerola (2020, 10 min) A minimalistic road movie mirroring the emotions of the driver through the landscapes (s)he has chosen to look at.

Shadegan dir Ako Salemi (2019, 15 min) Twelve-year-old Milad guides his boat across the Shadegan wetlands in southwestern Iran. The beautiful photography shows an apparently relaxed life, far away from the tyranny of mobile phones. Yet here, too, the threat of drought and pollution looms.

Above: Still from Shadegan, Ako Salemi, 2019