In dialogue with Elisa Giardina Papa's exhibition She Flickered In and Out of History, Iggy Cortez has selected five short works: Islands of Fire, It’s Raining Frogs Outside, Fireworks (Archives), Mekong Hotel and Barbs, Wastelands. Together, the films trace connections between ecological forces, histories of violence, and collective remembrance.

Iggy Cortez writes: 

"Selected in dialogue with the work of Elisa Giardina Papa, the films assembled in Indeterminate Ecologies engage elemental entanglements between fire, water, animal presence, and the weight of political memory. Spanning Italy, Thailand, the Philippines, and Portugal, these films enact a rethinking of relationality not only between human subjects but between humans and nonhuman assemblages, evincing a feminist and queer sensibility in their development not only of new relational modes but in their rethinking of what relationality constitutes in the first place. In these films, erupting volcanoes, sculpture gardens, river hotels, falling frogs, and scorched earth evince geological formations whose identities are never settled nor static and which open into broader interrogations of geopolitical territoriality. Human (and nonhuman) figures move in non-linear, circulatory disorientation through landscapes whose contours are experiencing radical transformation. Across their differences, these films undermine the distinctions between species, temporalities, as well as living and nonsentient matter in such a way that the ecologies they relay are never perceived as an inert backdrop for human activity but rather as terrains of unruly and unsettled relations resistant to resolution."


Islands of Fire, dir. Vittorio De Seta, 1954, 11 min. 
It’s Raining Frogs Outside (Ampangabagat Nin Talakba Ha Likol), dir. Maria Estela Paiso, 2021, 14 min. 
Fireworks (Archives), dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2014, 7 min. 
Mekong Hotel, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012, 61 min. 
Barbs, Wastelands, dir. Marta Mateus, 2017, 25 min.