matkalla [2022]

Video trailer for Matkalla [2022]

Matkalla [On The Journey] is the first in the Mothers|Lands Series by dance filmmaker Scotty Hardwig, co-created and performed by Andrea Olsen and Eeva-Maria Mutka. Shot on location in the Tornio Valley region of Lapland in northern Finland and Sweden, the film follows a suitcase, a basket, and two women on a midsummer's journey from the sea to the river, dancing their way across the landscapes of the arctic circle along the axis of time and myth.

The Mothers|Lands Series is a collection of dance-for-camera works that document movement artists relating to the non-human world and cultural imaginations of their native landscapes, where both human and land are treated as subjects that speak as equals. Through an improvised hybridity of cinematic and embodied art, these works explore the felt expression of nativity, homeland, and language at the crossroads of ecology, geology and culture. In 1983, Swiss philosopher Andre Corboz writes that landscape is “the palimpsest of time,” a canvas upon which human and non-human histories alike are written. Like bodies, landscapes are processes: subject to changes in time through “spontaneous transformation” (like erosion, flooding, glacial or volcanic activity) and “human activity” (like the building of roads, dams, bridges, farms or cities). He writes of landscapes as existing simultaneously as objective, quantifiable forms (which can be measured, known, cultivated and exploited) and as culturally perceived phantasms: “nature is that which the culture designates to be such.” But with what voice does a place speak for itself, in humming-slow tones as we tiny primates dance across its palimpsest of scarred and wrinkled skin? And where, and when, is the “sacred time and space” to listen?

a film by: Scotty Hardwig

co-created and performed by: Andrea Olsen and Eeva-Maria Mutka

geographer and b-cam: Michael Ryba

vocal improvisations by: Eeva-Maria Mutka

music: Scotty Hardwig: “Birch Bark Disco” ; Monplaisir: “Leaving Sky Valley,” “Il y a un bout de ciel bleu,” “La danse des petits animaux mignons,” “Vie et mort du fantôme de la machine,” “Stonehead” ; “IV. Bydlo Sempre moderato pesante” by Modest Mussorgsky, performed by Skidmore College Orchestra ; “Prelude and Fugue No. 8 in E Flat Minor, BWV 853, Prelude” by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed by Carlos Gardels ; “Cantate Domino” by Claudio Monteverdi, performed by Anonymous Choir

written by: Scotty Hardwig, sourced from improvisations with the performers and research from the interactive stone age exhibit at the Finnish National Museum, Helsinki

translations by: Eeva-Maria Mutka