Kayla Parker, David Sergeant +
Stuart Moore
Artists Kayla Parker and Stuart Moore embrace landscape film-making, environmental and ecological themes, ethical and sustainable practice. Their innovative short films are screened internationally. Recent exhibitions include Strangelove (UK), Visions in the Nunnery (UK), Contemporary Art Ruhr (Germany), VisualcontainerTV (Milan), Discovering Dalmatia VI (Croatia) and the Kepler Hall, Linz and ArtP Gallery, Vienna (Austria).
David Sergeant writes about climate change. His poems discuss the human impact on the planet and consider what we can do to make a difference. His fiction and poetry has appeared in The Dublin Review, Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, Rialto, the Guardian, the Forward Book of Poetry and elsewhere. He has also published two collections of poetry, the most recent being The Pronoun Utopia (Green Bottle Press, 2017).
THE OTHER SIDE OF NOW
2021
A short, collaborative film poem by artist film-makers Kayla Parker and Stuart Moore and the poet and writer David Sergeant that evokes the everyday-ness of life in a city, which seems to be wakening to new possibilities after the long period of pandemic and impacts of impending climate emergency. Nature colonises the abandoned public spaces of the present-day: erased by the ebb and flow of urban regeneration, these repurposed sites are resonant with the city’s layered histories, rewilded by visions from past and possible futures.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than – “
At this fork in the path for our collective planetary future, how can we imagine ourselves in a better world, a world that is materially achievable now but often seems beyond reach? How can we join that imagining to the present so as to open up a path to a better future?
Commissioned by the Sustainable Earth Institute.
Just as the current moment presents a fork in the path for our collective planetary future, so the ways in which we imagine the near future currently seem to be split. Many of the stories that we are telling ourselves about the challenges to come, however well-meaning their intentions, often represent a retreat from what actually needs to happen. Other stories are struggling to find a form that might allow a more positive vision to emerge. How can we imagine ourselves in a better world, a world that is materially achievable now but often seems beyond historical reach? And how can we join that imagining to the present so as to open up a path to a better future? These questions underpin the creative collaboration here.
