sol archer
“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”
Dionne Brand
Pas de Cerise Sans Noyau
Film
Duration: 67 mins
4:3 4k (UHD) Stereo Audio
Year: 2021
Spoken: French
Through the lens of place, taste, and the shared bodily experience of collective labour, labour which marks you - as after harvest workers hands are stained blue for weeks, we discussed the survival of tradition as a model of survival through relation. The film follows three seasons over three years, through embodied labour, environment, texture, and the gradiations of colour and sound in the harvest in autumn, distillation in winter, and reawakening in spring, a cycle under thread from newly unstable seasons.
Focussed on the association of identity with place through cultivation and care. The harvest is collective, with each family working the orchard of one another, and the tools, machines, and spaces are collectively owned. The survival of this form depends on the varieties of cherry tree they grow, and increasingly unpredictable and destructive seasons, as the past two years brought unseasonal heat and frost, destroying the harvest and forcing a new resilience and adaptation to changing cycles of the year.