Collaboration with Maya Watanabe
2026
Site specific single-channel video installation, colour, stereo sound, 20’
Over the past decades, the Arctic permafrost has lost one meter of ground each year. As it melts, it reveals bodies from the Pleistocene Epoch that appear frozen in time. Buried in ice for millennia, these remains have been prevented from decaying, sometimes with fur, skin, and internal organs intact. Jarkov is a remarkably well-preserved woolly mammoth who died 20,000 years ago. Upon discovery, he was extracted and relocated as a single, massive 23-ton block of frozen soil and surrounding sediments, with only two visible tusks protruding from it.
Carved out of the permafrost in northern Siberia, a subterranean network of tunnels now holds Jarkov, where a constant temperature of –12°C stops him from thawing out. The film is shot within this underground space, where the camera moves unhurriedly, carefully panning its frozen passages together with the few visible patches of Jarkov and other mammoths’ remains, such as bones and molars, preserved there.
The slow pace and macroscopic definition, however, do not ensure the legibility of the scene. Installed in a disquietingly tilted room so dark as to itself border on abstraction, the film enacts fragmented choreography of tight close-ups and environmental zoom-outs whereby images either emerge in crisp shapes or recede in a series of indistinct tactile textures – transparent and glass-like, opaque and metal-like, rugged and reef-like, hairy and weed-like.
The low-frequency, almost telluric soundtrack, composed by Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, relays this glacial, haunted space-time as if channelling ghostly presences from both the deep past and the near future, the disorienting effect heightened by the camera constantly rotating on itself. In this enigmatic atmosphere, caught between visibility and uncertainty, exposure and concealment, preservation and decomposition, bodies transform into landscapes, landscapes into bodies, and differences in scale between biological and geological life are blurred.
Ultimately, the video installation creates an embodied experience of a space and a time that predate and exceed the human lifespan, situating the viewer before a scenario that resists cognitive grasp.
The work of Maya Watanabe (1983, Peru) has been exhibited at De Pont Museum, MAXXI, Sharjah Art Foundation, Palais de Tokyo, Kyoto Art Center, Fridericianum, Matadero, Mori Art Museum, MASP, videobrasil, Havana Biennial 2019.
Additional credits
Co-produced by Mori Art Museum. Additional support from Mondriaan Fund. Courtesy Livia Benavides Galería, tegenboschvanvreden
Fondazione In Between Art Film announces Canicula, a group exhibition opening on May 6, 2026, at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice on the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi––the Fondazione’s artistic director and curator, respectively––Canicula is the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions initiated by Fondazione In Between Art Film that has seen the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto transformed each time into a form of cinematic architecture. Beginning in 2022 with Penumbra and continuing in 2024 with Nebula, for each show in the trilogy a different atmospheric phenomenon has been deployed in order to explore states of vision as metaphors for the human condition.
https://canicula.inbetweenartfilm.com/en/canicula-digital-guide/
