Evergreen

Evergreen is one of my earliest films and the themes that arose in its making still reverberate through every work that I make. The questions of the false dichotomies of remembrance and forgetfulness, heritage and spectacle, nature and culture, and human and nonhuman are central in this work and remain so throughout my practice (see figures 16–21). Evergreen was shot in Japan over a period of a few months in 2013, and explores the crisis of grand narratives in the face of the photographic image. The roles of agent and spectator, documentarian and participant, image and landscape are destabilized through the activities of the onscreen bodies as well as my own. Spatiality and temporality become interchangeable as nature becomes anthropomorphized. Nature indeed becomes a stand-in for heritage, while both end up amounting to pictorial spectacle. In the weaving of moving-image materials, which are connected to each other not causally, but through their co-existence in space-time, global shipping infrastructure appears to be put to use in the creation of an immanent utopia. 

Evergreen has informed my ongoing academic and artistic research into what I am calling "geological filmmaking." Operating under the horizon of the Anthropocene, the newly proposed geological epoch in which the human is said to have made changes to the geophysics of the Earth, geological filmmaking seeks to dehierarchize and destabilize the dualisms inherited from Enlightenment that have been substantially challenged in contemporary theory, such as nature and culture, subject and object, mind and matter, through a reworking of visuality by optical means. Already present in Evergreen, my current films seek to make landscape visible in a way that is not objectifying but embedded, to speak alongside but not for nature or geology, to consider not deep time but the deep now, to show matter to be process, to entangle embodied, geological, and historical temporalities and materialities. 

Sasha Litvintseva​ in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (June 2017)