Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield: Asbestos

About

Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. Towns became cities under its patronage, Persian kings entertained guests with its fireproof nature, and centuries of industry raked in the profits of its global application. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in waiting. Yet the asbestos industry has far from left us with extraction from the soil transforming to extraction from our walls. We are now faced with two options: to remove this material from our homes and start anew, or to build upon its residue. Removal is a dangerous and costly operation. So often we choose to live amongst it instead, choking out our walls with plastic tarping: the failed promises of modernism literally entombed all around us. Shot in the mining township of Asbestos, Quebec, home to the world’s largest asbestos mine that only stopped extraction in 2012, the film is a meditation on the entanglement of the fragility of bodies, the nonlinearity of progress, and the persistence of matter.

Asbestos premiered at the Berlinale Forum Expanded (Berlin, Germany) earlier this year, and later will be featured as part of Plastik Festival (Dublin, Ireland) and Courtisane Festival (Ghent, Belgium). Its exhibition at roaming projects will mark the first time Asbestos has been shown as part of an immersive installation, mimicking the tented houses that are shown in the video.

Sasha Litvintseva (b. 1989, Russia) is an artist, filmmaker, researcher and curator based in London. Her work has been exhibited worldwide including Berlinale Forum Expanded, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Wroclaw Media Art Biennale, Poland, The Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Modern Art Museum Moscow, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Kunstverein Gottingen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, including solo shows and retrospective screenings at Union Docs, New York, Super Dakota gallery, Brussels, Courtisane Film Festival, Ghent, Close-Up Film Centre, London, among many others. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art she is currently working on a PhD proposing the concept of geological filmmaking at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is a founding member of the Screen and Audiovisual Research Unit. She is also an independent curator of contemporary moving image and co-curator of the November Film Festival.

Graeme Arnfield (b. 1991, UK) lives and works in London. He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University. His work explores issues of communication, spectatorship and history and has been presented at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Courtisane Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, LUX, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Aesthetica Film Festival, Manchester Cornerhouse and on Vdrome.

To coincide with Asbestos, a screening organised by roaming projects, Sasha Litvintseva, Graeme Arnfield and Greta Hewison (FLAMIN, London) will take place on Wednesday 27th March at Close-Up Cinema, Shoreditch. More details to come.

roaming projects is an itinerant gallery and project space for contemporary art. Our current site is in Somers Town, London, on the site of an old rubber clothes shop.

For all enquiries:
Will Rees
will@roamingprojects.com
+44 7894 806 377

www.roamingprojects.com
@roamingprojects