Eyes of Plants

Synopsis

Filmed across the arid Atacama Desert–where the mining of precious metals and the recent privatization of the water industry threatens the stability of the local ecosystem–and in the fluorescent haze of a healing ceremony performed in an LED-lit, rose-filled shamanic shrine, Eyes of Plants portrays contemporary life as a contact zone: between myth and technology, desert culture and global capital, the sick body and the over-extracted earth. The starting point for the video is a jarro pato, a pre-Columbian duck-shaped ceramic vase belonging to the Diaguita people of Northern Chile and Argentina, often depicted with tears streaming from its eyes. Later supplanted by other technologies of sight and perception, including a blinking drone that surveilles from the sky and the green glowing eyes of a USB-powered face mask, the jarro pato figures into a new mythology of an evolving present–one informed by both spiritualism and capitalism.