Chris Dufour will present his research at an informal 4 to 6 in VU’s production spaces on Wednesday November 20.
A Phenolic Trace is an experimental film project seeking to activate industrial/post-industrial ecologies as collaborators in creating visuals of sites discarded and/or gone feral. Centering material practice and research, the project asks what may arise when we invite a relational practice to discarded and altered ecologies? Can it offer a site to sit with dystopian futures or observe an ecological shifting baseline? Film photography works here to index the processes and invite ecologies themselves to become activators of the image, their phenolic compounds transforming the exposed silver.
Chris will be working as a resident to continue research on the deforested cutblock while also facilitating workshops on materials practices in plant-based photographic processes. With a cohort of artists, they will utilize and explore the poetic potential of phenols hidden within an ecology and experiment with a myriad of techniques and approaches. The artists will work together at the intersection of extractivism, film, plant-based techniques, and photography in this processed-base project.
The conversation will be in English.