Acid Forest

Q&A with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Anton Vidokle

This wry reinvention of the nature documentary spies upon the local fauna of Lithuania’s Curonian Spit, observing from the same remove the cormorants who nest there and the human tourists who come to puzzle at their curious existence. What looks like a gray, apocalyptic wasteland on Lithuania’s otherwise scenic Baltic coastline—denuded of foliage by the birds’ highly acidic defecations—becomes a Rorschach blot for passing human visitors from all over the world, whose wildly divergent speculations about the cormorants and their habitat comically reveal the human species’ own ambivalent relationship with the natural world.

Preceded by:
Citizens of the Cosmos
Anton Vidokle, USA, 2019, 31m
Japanese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Based on a 1922 manifesto by Ukrainian anarchist Alexander Svyatogor, the latest from artist Anton Vidokle transposes Russian cosmism to present-day Japan. Through a combination of song, speech, and interpretive dance, Svyatogor’s notions of mysticism and immortality find intriguing new resonances.

With kind support from the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York.