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Alexandra Gelis: Sirenian Drift
Sirenian Drift
(p. 289 – 326)

Alexandra Gelis

Sirenian Drift
Archival Material from a Future River

  • cultural studies
  • cultural history
  • media studies
  • literary studies
  • art history
  • film experience
  • aesthetics of film
  • sound
  • life sciences
  • music

My language
English

Selected content
English

Alexandra Gelis

Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan-Canadian media artist whose research-based, process-oriented practice spans film, photography, drawing, and media installations incorporating custom-built interactive electronics and sound. Her single-screen films and modular immersive non-fiction installations delve into the ecologies of various landscapes through personal field research, examining socio-political interventions. Gelis collaborates with communities across the Americas, focusing on the interplay between plants, people, and power in the context of colonization and globalization. Her concept of Migrant Plants explores plants as political allies in struggles against colonialism, war, and migratory and racial regimes, documenting the autonomous behavior of these plants. Gelis’s projects have been exhibited internationally across North and South America, Europe, and Africa. She holds a PhD in Environmental Studies and Urban Change.
Other texts by Alexandra Gelis for DIAPHANES
Giuseppe Di Salvatore (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): The Sirenic: Follow the Water, Follow the Sound

“Follow the Water Follow the Sound” is a call and response. Far removed from the associations of seduction and fear that the siren — both as mythological figure and alarm device — has inspired, it is an invitation to another perceptual attunement to our environment. Offering an original perspective, the book imagines the “Sirenic” as a practice oriented towards emergent futures, fabulations of becoming and pedagogies of transformation.

The book engages with notions of singing, voicing and listening that reach into a sonic pluriverse. Through these notions, it provides the grounds for an expanded conception of cinema emerging through sound, music and performance.

Bringing together scholars, curators and artists from across disciplines, the book unfolds as a polyphonic publication. Echoing one another in multiple ways, the authors explore the mythologies and ecologies of water, the poetics and politics of voice, and the invocation of a communal spirit through film and other arts.

 

With contributions by Ruth Baettig, Dalida María Benfield, Elena Biserna, Mattia Capelletti, Giuseppe Di Salvatore, Burcu Dogramaci, Magali Dougoud, Lidia Gasperoni, Alexandra Gelis, Tobias Gerber, Ute Holl, Roberta Ioli, Pauline Julier and Caroline Courrioux, Fabienne Liptay, Gabriel Paiuk, Alice Sartori, Davide Tolfo, Alexandra Tsiamparta, Matthias Maria Wittmann.

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