On 2 September 2011 the British Council presented “Anarcadia”, a film by Ruth Maclennan, to a select audience of video-art and cinema professionals and aficionados, art experts and critics, on September 2, at the British Council conference room, at 15:30.
‘Anarcadia’ is a video work shot by a British artist Ruth Maclennan, among the deserts of Kazakhstan in summer 2010. The film introduces two iconic characters: an archaeologist and a prospector; each of them journey across this apparently empty but symbolically charged terrain. For both protagonists, the land prefigures a deeper preoccupation with what lies beneath it – an excavation of the forgotten legacies and uncertain narratives of history, as well as potential material benefit that mineral wealth of this territory can bring.
These parallel journeys, evoking certain magnetic attraction of the frontier, as a free and open tabula rasa, may cause a certain reference, in the viewer, to the imagery of the American “Wild West”. Maclennan deliberately overlaps the two “journeys” and reveals contradiction of incentives of the two characters. The mood of the film is pensive and thought provoking. The impression echoes the fundamental indeterminacy of the desert landscape itself: unreliable, unpredictable, yet still a beguiling, open-ended canvas for human hopes and dreams.
The name Anarcadia is deeply symbolic. Arcas is a Greek mythological character, son of Zeus and nymph Callisto. Arcadia is a province in Greece, where Arcas lived and reigned. According to the Greek mythology, Arcadia was also the home of the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, of mountain wilds and hunting, Pan. In European Renaissance arts, Arcadia was celebrated as an unspoiled, harmonious wilderness. A Greek prefix an- means absence of, non. “Anarcadia” refers to a wilderness which is fact is not wild or untouched.
This ambitious video work was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, in association with Stills, Edinburgh, and Ffotogallery, Cardiff. It was presented in the UK in association with Castlefield Gallery, Manchester.
The project was funded by Arts Council England, and with the generous support of the British Council Kazakhstan. Additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation.
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