Screening and talk: Cinematic Topographies: Thinking Place Through the Moving Image

On 8 August at 2 p.m., Galleri Image will present a screening of Elisabeth Brun’s work, followed by a conversation with Vanina Saracino.
How does technology shape our understanding of place? In Elisabeth Brun’s moving image works, the camera becomes a means of thinking through technology and environments, engaging place as an active agent and a generative force. Drawing on her concept of moving image topography, her films connect intimate and systemic scales, tracing how perception is mediated and how we orient ourselves within complex, technologically entangled worlds through the use of lenses.
The event includes the screening of Brun’s works Big Tech Blues (2025) and 3xShapes of Home (2020), along with excerpts from her most recent research on mountains as prism for understanding the relation between human and geological time. It is followed by a conversation with independent curator and lecturer Vanina Saracino, reflecting on the camera as a tool for spatial knowledge and worldbuilding.

Program outline
14:00–14:15 greetings and introductions
14:15–14:45 screening of works (order TBD):
– 3xShapes of Home (7’, 2020)
– Big Tech Blues (20’, 2025)
– Excerpts of work in progress (5´)
14:45–15:15 Elisabeth and Vanina in conversation
15:15–15:30 Q&A with audience

About the works
3xShapes of Home, 7´, 2020
The artist revisits her childhood place in the sub-Arctic North of Norway. Over two years, she explores through her camera how these environments have shaped her attachment and her thinking. Hunting for insight beyond herself she tests her relation to place, against the agency of the camera, the agency of an algorithm and the subjectivity of other creatures. 3xShapes of Home lingers somewhere between an essay film, a structural experiment and a visual poem. In 2020 it was awarded Kings College´s Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment in Visual Arts.

Big tech Blues, 19’, 2025
The work reflects on life and resilience in rural communities in the age of Big Tech. The artist’s abandoned childhood school in the small village of Strengelvåg, Northern Norway, was acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink program – an event that sparked reflections on what is at stake as rapidly evolving digital technology infiltrates all aspects of human life. The work intertwines a personal narrative about SpaceX’s intrusion into the artist’s hometown with reflections on attachment, freedom, nostalgia, and progress. It meditates on the complex relationships people have with their environments, highlighting the double bind of digital technology and the significance of embodied experience for memory and attachment.

How Mountains are Made (WIP).
A series of moving image works (work in progress) exploring the relation between deep time and human time, through the prism of media technology and a specific mountain in Northern Norway.

The event is free and will take place in English.

Elisabeth Brun (b. 1977, Northern Norway) is a filmmaker, artist and researcher working with moving image, installation, XR and archival practices. Her work explores how topographies, infrastructures and media shape perception, memory and environmental awareness, often focusing on the relations between place, technology and knowledge. Her films and installations have been shown internationally at venues such as Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Seattle Art Museum, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, MedienKunstTage NRW and Lofoten International Art Festival. She holds a PhD in Media Studies, and is the author of Place and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2025), which explores the eco-critical potential of essayistic and experimental film practices. She is also trained in site-specific and public art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and is currently a visiting scholar and artist at the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions (CRAPCC), Aarhus University. Brun is based in Oslo.
Vanina Saracino is an independent curator, writer, and lecturer whose work explores artistic and theoretical perspectives that challenge anthropocentric worldviews and examine relations between humans, nonhumans, and planetary systems. Her recent curatorial projects investigate cultural imaginaries of energy, solarity, and ecological transformation. Her latest pros currently co-curating Solar Kin (2025–2026) at the North Norwegian Art Centre (Lofoten, Norway), a series of exhibitions examining the Sun as a cultural, ecological, and political force shaping contemporary understandings of energy and planetary life. Saracino previously co-curated two editions of the Screen City Biennial: Ecologies – Lost, Found and Continued (Stavanger, 2019) and Other Minds (Berlin, 2022; Stavanger, 2025). Since 2021 she has been a lecturer in Experimental Film and Media Art at Universität der Künste Berlin. Her curatorial work and writing engage environmental humanities, multispecies perspectives, and artistic research.