Visions of Clouds_Octobre 2022 (Contentious Sky)

Truant School (Tiphaine Abenia, Maxime Bondu, Julien Griffit, Myriam Treiber, Uri Wegman)

Looking for the very first flowering plant in the history of Earth, blooming more than 140 million years ago, botanists reconstructed the profile of the ancestral flower. In the Cretaceous period, while the planet was warmer and richer in oxygen, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, the first-ever flower appeared, looking just like a Magnolia.

Through one of the high arched windows of the Lemon House, a fixed camera observes the immense Magnolia Grandiflora of the Saroli park and extends its framing to the sky above the villa. The film is continuous, day and night, capturing the rustling of leaves, the halos of light pollution, the passing of clouds, the running of the Luganese.

Over the past years something strange has happened to the air. It had become visible, heavy, loaded. We sense a shift in meaning and in the perception of air. Blanketing the sky, clouds trap excess heat and pollution, turning it into a human-made skyscape. The current rise in temperature brings the Magnolia back to its original sky. Looking at it today is examining the interplay between past, present, and future.

The film captures the signs of a moving sample of the sky. The dynamics captured are not governed by any linear law and resist to probabilistic anticipation attempts. An apprentice robot tries to grasp these atmospheric fluctuations. He identifies its manifestations, interprets its signs and transfers a first interpretation. The script reaches the matrix printer which draws, point by point, the memory of a disputed sky.