Stenar Projects

Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks. A humid take on minerals, where sci-fi meets sci-fact. The geo-biosphere is a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.

Life of farmer Gloria is on collision course with the insane project of a crypto investor. Brother Lukas comes home to find a colossal bitcoin mining center located on the cemetery. After a baby goat dies, the siblings confront the mine.

Holding in her mind Dorothea Tanning’s painting Some Roses and their Phantoms (1952) and its sickening presentation of objects as between states of being, Wardill made a film that also hovers between definitions. The architecture of the Gulbenkian auditorium in Lisbon, its colors and sense of being lost in time accompany us through a loop where a man wanders the building at night, followed by something that is not human. Through the care and paranoia with which she approaches the digital image, the artist investigates the past’s haunting of the present and the remnants of textures longing to be touched. Wardill’s work takes an interest in the appropriation of models to express ideas and the way in which fixed scenarios become exemplary. She explores the opacity of communication to deconstruct the way in which materials or the implication of the material are used to elucidate ideas.

For her newly commissioned video "Night 4 Day," Wardill has used the fake relationship between a mother and a son to think about what would happen if a communist revolutionary gave birth to a techno utopian, if gender as performitivity was thought through the lens of women making the political decision to live clandestinely in Portugal for a larger part of the 20th century and if the "Last Woman" were the fem bot from "The Tales of Hoffman."