Miška Mandić

A woman places a clear plastic bag of plump yellow lemons on a wooden dining table. The lemons begin to shrivel, turning white, green, then black. Mould and rot cake the inside of the plastic as bacteria, yeasts and fungi feed. Water evaporates from the lemons and condenses, gripping to the plastic film until the water-body is so robust that its weight congeals into lively drips. Cockroaches and fruit flies approach the figures, their curiosity recorded as bursts of activity appear as if through quantum folding: now on this lemon, now on the cherries, now gone. At the centre of the table, a monolithic iPhone—concealing dozens of geological minerals behind its shiny smoothness—is lifted up by soil from which mushrooms slowly burst and spore. Meanwhile a vase of tulips sits next to a stem of pink queen protea; the tulips bow and twist as the moisture in their stems evaporates, a dramatic sight compared to the stillness of the protea, its colour slowly and subtly de-saturating.

Residue is a 26 minute film centred around a series of domestic tableaux shot at different frame rates (including time-lapses shot over many months, and extreme slow-motion shooting at 1900 frames per second) which are then composited together, forming a single scene where Angela, played by Eora-based choreographer and dancer Angela Goh, interacts with decomposing still-lifes. The resulting composited images at first appear familiar and unified, but attentiveness to the slow shifts and gestures of the work exposes the juxtaposition of multiple unsettled temporalities. 

In Residue, the overlooked mouldy time of fruit is brought into proximity with the disproportionately grandiose time of the human event, of Angela’s anguish as she eventually drops and smashes her mobile phone. This film investigates the inescapable links between domestic and wider ecologies, de-escalating the accelerated all-absorbing ‘event’ status of the intimate preoccupations of the human character with the ’nothingness’ of slow movements, enmeshments, quiet seepages and residues of the surrounding assemblages.
In a recent PhD examination document, Elizabeth Povinelli, author of Geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism, 2016, and founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective, writes of this work that it provides a way “to link the space-time of the modern (colonial-capitalism) to the complicities of contemporary cinematic productions and to demonstrate another cinema whose spacetime is one of knots, folds, willy paths and other alternative forms could overcome the deadly metabolic rift of western space-time.”