This winter, Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Warehouse plays host to artist-filmmaker, Sarah Wood’s film Project Paradise. The work isinspired by the Black and White Oil Conference organised by Richard Demarco in Edinburgh in 1974 at which Joseph Beuys and Buckminster Fuller both spoke. The conference took place in the context of the imminent exploitation of oil and natural gas in the North Sea. It posed a number of questions and made observations frighteningly relevant now as we try to find ways to combat climate change.
50 years on, Wood’s film examines the idea of Paradise as a way of talking about how we relate to nature now as often something simply to commodify. The film invites viewers to open up thought and imagine how we might want to live in the future. Projected as a portal into the floor of the warehouse, Project Paradise invites midwinter audiences to gather round the light of the image and come together as participants in the reimagining of a new way of living in the world.
Director of Fruitmarket, Fiona Bradley said “ One of the defining convictions of Fruitmarket – founded in 1974, the same year as the Black and White Oil Conference – is that the experience of art can help, if only by clearing a space in which to think together. As Fruitmarket goes into our 50th year, let’s imagine a more positive way of living in the world and strive for a new kind of collective energy.”
Sarah Wood, who is also a writer and curator, works primarily with the still and moving image to explore the role the documentary archival plays in the narration of history. Since she began working in artists’ film in 2000 her ambition has been to generate a cinema of ideas – experimenting with film form to offer renewing space for viewers to consider some of the key social and political issues of our time.
She gained early success with found footage films made for both single screen and site-specific installation before turning her attention to the meaning of archiving and the politics of memory, winning film festival awards and having work acquired by cultural institutions across the world.
Wood’s other central concern is migration – both the movement of displaced people round the world and the migration of ideas via the situation that art creates. Inclusivity is key for her practice – collaborating with artists, writers and thinkers in a creative attempt to open the space of art to dialogue and to encourage viewer participation.
Her focus on the historical image has led to opportunities to respond to several filmmaker archives (Stanley Kubrick (artist-in-residence), Margaret Tait (LUX Scotland), Thorold Dickinson and Derek Jarman (John Hansard)) which in turn has galvanised her to reconsider cinematic form for the post-COVID landscape
Dates and times:
09th December 2023 till 21st January 2024
11am–6pm daily
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 