Kunsthal Aarhus is hosting the screening of two recent films by artists Sonia Levy and Paolo Patelli. Both films engage with waterscapes and the aesthetics of different elemental media, opening dialogues about environmental degradations and ways of sensing within the interconnected spheres of water, soil, and air.

Sonia Levy's Creatures of Lines was developed with environmental anthropologist Heather Anne Swanson (Aarhus University). The inquiry-led film immerses viewers inside England's canal system to engage colonial capitalism and its material consequences, questioning the conversion of meandering worlds into linearised waterscapes. The project draws on longstanding discussions and collaborative scientific study with Loughborough University academics.

Paolo Patelli’s Saaret (Islands) was developed as part of a collaboration with Helsinki Biennial 2023 where the Aarhus University research group on Critical Environmental Data developed an audiotour around Helsinki. Patelli’s film engages with this environmental archipelago, composed of heat and energy islands, insulated atmospheres and artificial climates, sensitive touchpoints and model worlds. It works as an experimental “city symphony” with music score by Angelo Maria Farro.

The screenings and discussion with Sonia Levy and Paolo Patelli, together with Heather Swanson and Jussi Parikka, is organized with support from Kunsthal Aarhus and in collaboration with the Aarhus PhD summer school in Environmental Humanities and Media.

It's free to attend, but we recommend securing a seat on Billetto.

The artist film Creatures of the Lines by Sonia Levy is developed in collaboration with the environmental anthropologist Heather Anne Swanson. The project explores the transformation of English waterscapes via the construction of canals, investigating how desires for economic growth and linear progress have straightened forms in England's watery terrains. As arteries of the British Empire, canals linked Indian cotton fields to domestic textile mills, facilitating vast ecological transformations from monoculture agriculture in the colonies to industrial discharges in England's waters, soils, and airs – and thus operate as critical sites for examining often-overlooked histories of colonial capitalism and their material consequences in contemporary British worlds. The film attempts to work from within canals' submerged sites rather than grand narratives or god's-eye perspectives, fostering ways of noticing from below. It raises questions from within the lines, exploring the complexities of transformed aquatic life and their ties to the infrastructures of the global political economy.

Saaret is a short film directed by Paolo Patelli, co-written with Jussi Parikka and May Ee Wong, and scored by Angelo Maria Farro. It refers to the city of Helsinki as an environmental archipelago, composed of heat and energy islands, insulated atmospheres and artificial climates, sensitive touchpoints and model worlds. Through the six stories that unfold and connect different areas of the city, a hybrid narrator voice emerges as a "data subject”: an ecological subjectivity produced by and through sensing, an entity at once abstract and embodied into different physical forms, environments, and temporal perspectives. Born out of the documentation of the Environmental Audiotour produced by the same authors for the Helsinki Biennial 2023, the film alludes to the now-extinct genre of the city symphony while also letting the Super8 film format create a dreamlike temporal ambivalence reminiscent of old travel movies and nature documentaries, and emphasizing the fragility of the image frames as envelopes themselves.

Sonia Levy is an artist whose work examines Western expansionist and extractivist logics while tending to critical forms of engagement with more-than-human worlds. She explores filmmaking as a tool for site-based inquiries and interdisciplinary collaborations. Levy was the 2023-24 European Marine Board artist-in-residence and participated in the 2022 S+T+ARTS4Water residency in Venice. In 2021, she was commissioned at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University's Ecological Globalization Research Group. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Museo Thyssen, Madrid, ICA London, and Baltic Gateshead, and published by MIT Press and Thames & Hudson. Levy is an Associate Lecturer in Media Studies at the Royal College of Art and a recent UN Ocean Decade Steering Committee member.

Paolo Patelli is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Aarhus University working on the project Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data. With a background in architecture and an interest in multimodal methods, he manipulates research and artistic practice to engage with the materialities, scenes, and atmospheres at the intersections of space and society, technologies and environments.

Read more about Paolo Patelli here: paolopatelli.com