Welcome to attend the fifth edition of Stockholm’s environmental humanities festival for film and text, Crosscuts. For the third night of Crosscuts, we will have a screendance session screening three shorts screendance films, curated by Davide De Lillis, followed by a discussion
A session that delves into screendance, screening Cave Aquam, Ramita Seca & Birds of the Earth, curated by Davide De Lillis. Followed by discussion.
Cave Aquam
Cave Aquam explores the ecological and political consequences of travertine quarrying in central
Italy. The work takes place in the so-called Travertine Basin (Tivoli, Rome), where extractive sites
were first opened by the Romans, systematically reactivated under the Fascist regime, and are now
nearing exhaustion due to contemporary industrial extraction. Cave Aquam foregrounds water as a
transformative force that reclaims abandoned quarries and generates unforseen ecologies, raising
the question of how to engage with these contested landscapes today
Italy, 8 minutes, directed by Davide De Lillis
Ramita Seca
In Ramita Seca, La Colonialidad Permanente, Argentine artist and dancer Maximiliano Mamani
pays homage to the Aymara revolutionary Bartolina Sisa, reactivating Indigenous histories of
resistance. In the video, the figure of Bartolina Xixa—conceived as a drag persona—dances within
a landfill in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, drawing on the traditional form of the vidala to stage a
powerful gesture of embodied defiance. The work exposes the enduring structures of coloniality,
foregrounding those who bear the ecological and social costs of extraction while remaining
invisible.
Argentina, 5 minutes, directed by Maximilano Mamani
Birds of the Earth
Birds in the Earth uses the juxtaposition of classical ballet and Sámi cultural forms to raise
questions of land rights, visibility, and representation. In the film we follow two ballerinas as they
glide through the landscape and eventually arrive at the Parliament in Helsinki.
