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WOLLUMBIN BY MALENA SZLAM

Filmed on 16mm, Wollumbin (in development) circles one of the largest extinct volcanoes on earth. With its eruptions long ceased, and its softer flanks eroded over twenty million years into a vast caldera, only the resistant core stands at the centre. Moving around the mountain rather than ascending it, holding it at a respectful distance and contextualising it through the surrounding terrain, this film traces perspectives between the eroded vent and the coast, recognising the ancient lava eruptions that surface as columns of sea-swept basalt. Deep time folds into the present, and the land, of enduring cultural significance to the Bundjalung nation and many other nations connected to it, is met not as a summit to be reached but as a living body of stone, time, and sound.

As part of Towards a Counter-Cartography of Volcanic Time, an ongoing, multi-form filmic series tracing notions of volcanic deep time, this work embraces the geologic histories which connect the Southern Hemisphere, from the Southern Andes to eastern Australia. Wollumbin follows the installation Archipelago of Earthen Bones and the film Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya. Lawrence English's sound composition uses microphonic imagination, vibrations from the underground, and biophonic sounds of birds and insects recorded originally from these sites.

This series of film works attends to the voices beneath the volcanic surface and the signs written in the earth above it, developing counter practices of contemporary cartography that question the frontiers dividing nature, culture, and geopolitics.

Malena Szlam is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her films, installations, and photographs explore embodied perception and the material and affective dimensions of analogue film process. Szlam's work gives form to lyrical approximations of the natural world. Attentive to the geopolitics of natural phenomena, her recent work focuses on geology, earth science, and volcanology.

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