Perennial
Perennial unpacks my first experience of home: growing up on an orchard in Lake Country, BC (a small community in the Okanagan Valley).
In this intergenerational collaboration, I created a cyclical montage of silent 8mm films shot by my great-grandfather, Arthur Geen. Amid the usual family film fare, his films capture agricultural and recreational life in Okanagan, spanning from the late 1940s to early 1970s.
By pairing the films with present-day sound recordings from the Okanagan, I create an interplay of images and sounds that oscillates between forged synchronicity and intentional asynchronicity, both revealing and collapsing the temporal distance between myself and my great-grandfather. On a second channel of video, I type “captions” for the audio on a typewriter, poetically reflecting my 21st century experience of the Okanagan.
Making this film led me to reflect closely on my settler-colonial agricultural ancestry, the realities of growing fruit, climate change, and my relationship to Sylix Okanagan territories, as well as the plants, animals and insects that inhabit them.