Miška Mandić

In ‘Residue’ the geological time held by all the minerals inside a mobile phone is visualised alongside the fruiting, sporing and decomposing time of fungi and soil. This is a troubled sense of stillness — the iPhone, like the lemon, like Angela, like the film crew, collide with people, animals, geological and tectonic movements, cameras, computers, ideologies, and visions of nationhood and time. Residue reconsiders what is regarded as important in the cinematic traditions of Western modernity and how in the gaps of its vision there are textures worth noticing.

The danger of grafting time onto space and naturalising an efficient topology of time is in what it does to the possibilities of human relations within ecosystems. The story of time and history as knowable, linear, chronological—an omnipresent force that exists outside of us and that always there recording and fixing events in an orderly and factual way impacts how we build relations with mountains and rivers, with loved ones, and with our own sense of how the embodied span between birth and death is given meaning. These are not efficient relations. Cultural and social practices of reckoning time alter the way the relations between actions and impacts are understood. They determine what gets to be the event and what gets to be the empty spaces in between.

But if there are objects and technologies that have managed to train human subjects into faster temporalities, into reflex actions, does there not exist the possibility of working to steal back from modernity different tempos and speeds, by way of different objects and practices? By insisting on playing with alternate representations of these relations? Not thinking of objects, things, humans, ecologies, geologies, cinema, time and relationships as commodities or containers seems a good place to start this work. Cinema seems well positioned to do this work.

‘Residue’ aims to bring audiences into contact with the kind of deep, slow time of geological formations, the playful messy time of mould and rot, the quick burst of a collapsing tulip petal, the green powder coats the yellow lemon before it collapses and hardens.

These domestic timescapes breach thresholds through portals that gather social, historical and material forces into the home, finding themselves held by the pasts and futures of the objects and critters contained in them as they quietly sit at the knotty joint between the inside and the outside, between intimacy and that which is temporally and spatially distributed. These portals are central to understanding the profound, human-driven changes to the biosphere, connecting the comfort of intimate objects and spaces to the extractive processes of colonial-capitalism and their effect on distributed ecologies.