Phantom Landscapes
Non-spaces bearing the unseen traces of the histories they’ve witnessed. The landscapes explored in the films gathered by Phantom Landscapes carry within them the gloomy legacy of colonial regimes, wars, waves of uncontrolled urban developments, as well as the scathing industrial and extractive interventions that caused numerous retracings of borders and dramatic population displacements throughout the last century. The skyline of a post-industrial city flickering menacingly on the screen, a boundless desert that hides the traces of an almost forgotten genocide or the empty streets of a city at war caught in haste from a moving vehicle are recovered here as phantomatic images of modernity, images where the past and present co-exist in a liminal state, signaling us that the history of violence and exploitation continues to repeat itself. (Oana Ghera)
