8 REELS FROM ECUADOR documents artists Gabriel Orozco, and Broomberg & Chanarin as they journey throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon.
In 2007, after having spent more than two years primarily in Mexico, artist Gabriel Orozco and his family went to Bonn, Germany, where they would stay for approximately five months. Orozco interrupted this stay only with occasional visits to Paris and one to Ecuador.
That April David de Rothschild, a friend of Orozco's, invited the artist to join him on an expedition to explore the Ecuadorian rainforests ravaged by the oil industry. Along with Orozco, Rothschild invited photographers Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg, filmmaker Dustin Lynn, and ethnobotanist Maria Fadiman "as a test of what artists could accomplish when brought face to face with ecological disaster". After traveling throughout the Amazon, the group ended up in an Achuar Nation settlement in the village of Sharamentsa. There Orozco created a series of drawings that eventually became an installation reminiscent of the "working tables". Barrowing a small notebook from Rothschild and using dried twigs as brushes, Orozco stained the paper with an ink that the people of Sharamentsa traditionally used as body paint. A group of children watched him work. He asked the children to grab handy pieces of clay to hold the paper in place while the ink dried. They brought him the broken bits of pottery and placed one piece per paper. As Orozco has recalled, "The moment I put the paper on the table, they tried to be the fastest to put the piece of pottery on top of it. Probably they liked that I was doing my own thing and they could check me out, instead of me looking at how they work the land or how they do their own things." Admiring the pieces of red-stained paper weighed down by red pottery shards, Orozco decided that the drawings should remain in this configuration. The tabletop installation was exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery the following year.
Filmed entirely using a 16mm Bolex crank-wind camera, and limited to only 35-40 second takes at a time. The film was mostly edited in camera then organized chronologically into eight vignettes or reels.
Directer, Cinematographer, Editor
Dustin Lynn
Featuring
Gabriel Orozco
Broomberg & Chanarin
David de Rothschild
Narration by
Gabriel Orozco
Film Colorist
Gino Panaro
©DustinLynn2018
