Out of the gardens

Out of The Gardens has no true nationality, thus reflecting the territory it occupies: Antarctica, where men have banished all military endeavors. Those who have remained keep walking along the coldest and windiest point in the world. Russian Orthodox clergymen, a Spanish musician, German biologists, and even the shadow of Chinese presence, all add up to this distant land’s identity, at once a center of scientific and spiritual quest. Quimu Casalprim’s message, however, is not about the site’s dryness. On the contrary, his film discloses a paradoxically warm Antarctica. The video shot with special old lenses magnifies each and every bungalow and camp, like a tiny island of light caught in its snow cocoon. The almost-vegetal warmth released provides our ideas with land, and gives us the chance to finally invent and disregard the past. Here, everyone is equal, and everyone has made the same bet. Old film is burned as if to erase traces of the past. Our pulse is already beating at the steady rate of these white spaces. Bodies are made visible in their sleep, relieved. Connected to strange machines, they are dreaming of the possibility of a truly different day after. From bones cut with a knife to the melancholy tune of a distant saxophone, Out of The Gardens captures the same diffuse sweetness. Among these men, a mysterious feminine figure seems to arise from time to time, present and absent at once – a tribute to Tarkovski perhaps? Maybe she is a ghost, but the time she is coming from is yet to come: a guide for all dreamers of Antarctica. (VP)