spina is a film on a spinous wait. 35mm analog photographs of cacti and insectean field recordings unveil a sharp and sinuous world, but there is something else here. Is this landscape not what it seems?



> director’s note (PLEASE READ AFTER VIEWING):

spina is a film on a spinous wait. It investigates the various forms and shapes of cacti and the soundscape that surrounds them. 35mm analog photographs and insectean field recordings unveil a sharp and sinuous world, but there is something else here. Is this landscape not what it seems?

Indeed, spina turns out to be a vignette on the suggestive power of the uncanny architecture of these cacti and the greenhouse-bus stop that cages them. Both parties conversing, the plants offer to the waiting human a window onto another landscape, another place, another soundscape, a momentary haven, far from the roaring traffic of the adjacent Mediterranean coastal road. Which sounds and shapes were really present? Which ones were the fruits of the character’s imagination?

This ambiguity gives spina its subtle oneiric and fictional quality, but the short film is also a direct documentation of this singular bus stop and its design. Built more than 50 years ago in the middle of a small Italian town’s main artery, this greenhouse is a unique sighting. It acts as a way out of the urban surroundings. Is this confined greenery intended as a gateway to nature? Or is it a demonstration of the human desire to tame it? There is a vagueness there, two opposite pulls, the insects on one side, the traffic on the other, both materializing disparate environments.

In spina the human dreams of an elsewhere before being pulled back to the clockwork Anthropocene, the cacti still watching over their shoulder. The bus stop is a longing for greenery, for the hills, for a forgotten touch and relationship with the non-human world here retained behind glass and left on the side of the road.

> direction, photographs, sounds, and editing: Pablo Diserens
> presence: Madelyn Byrd

> viewing with headphones or speakers recommended

screenings
2023 - “Magiæ Naturalis: Cine de Vanguardia en el jardín II” botanical avant-garde film festival - Todoli Citrus Fundació (ES)