Sueño de Obsidiana [2023]

Video trailer for Sueño de Obsidiana [2023]

Sueño de Obsidiana [Obsidian Dream] is the third and final film in the Mothers|Lands Series by dance filmmaker Scotty Hardwig, co-created and performed by Claudia Lavista. Shot on location in Oaxaca, Mexico, the film follows a woman on a spiritual journey through portals of the natural world: water, earth, air, and fire. Framed in the symbolic world of pre-Hispanic Mexican culture, her body is exposed and caught between what is outside and what is inside. In her wild space, both powerful and fragile.

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: Claudia Lavista

Claudia Lavista es miembro del Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte del SACPC 2020-23

music: Mario Lavista: “Reflejos de la noche,” “Kyrie (Missa Ad Consolationis Dominam Nostram),” “Gloria (Missa-Lavista)”

geographer and b-cam: Michael Ryba

production assistant: Itzcuahuzin Edahi Robles Gris

spiritual guide: Adriana Gris Ruiz

special thanks to: Rodrigo Robles Trinidad, Yaotzin Yady Robles Gris, Doña Carmen, and Daniel Brena