Ivana Miloš, Three Reeds (2022), monotype, gouache, collage, and nature print with reeds on paper.The line of dancing children on the shorewas life exploding from the drought.Among thin reeds and branches the human plantgrew in pure air.—“Cuttlefish Bones,” Eugenio MontaleSometimes, in order to understand the meaning of a plant in a film, it is necessary to look for the same plant in another film. The majestic reed beds that appear towards the tragic finale of a breathless chase sequence between Nazi soldiers and two partisans in the middle part of Aleksandar Petrović’s devastating anti-war parable Three (1965) seemed strangely familiar when I first saw the film. I also saw them in a beautiful document of a disappearing way of life, Obrad Gluščević’s Ljudi s Neretve (1966). Both films were shot around the same time, in the middle of the 1960s, in one of Yugoslavia’s most fertile regions,...
- 12/21/2022
- MUBI
Ivana Miloš, Children in the Trees (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage on paper.The Innocence Of Rebelling"I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds' nests, but for the pleasure of getting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by."—Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (1957) When I was ten years of age, a girl that I liked gave me a handwritten checklist of things she wanted us to do together. One of them read: Spend the whole night sitting on the branch of a tree and watching the moon together. Unfortunately, heights have never been...
- 11/22/2022
- MUBI
Ivana Miloš, Agatha and the Limitless (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage on paper.Summer in WinterWhat would we do without air, without light?—Marguerite Duras, Agatha and the Limitless ReadingsThe hotel Les Roches Noires was located in Trouville-sur-Mer, France, and, as with so many hotels, its fame came from its visitors, in this case Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Claude Monet, and Marguerite Duras. In 1981, the foyer of the hotel was decorated with several intriguing, almost otherworldly plants whose type it is difficult for an amateur to classify. I know of these plants because Duras used the abandoned off-season, Second Empire-style hotel, which served as her temporary home, as a location to film Agatha and the Limitless Readings in March of that year. With different texts and films set in Les Roches Noires, this should not remain the last time Duras looked through its huge windows towards the English Channel but the...
- 10/24/2022
- MUBI
Ivana Miloš, The Man Who Made Cacti Bloom (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage on paper.Home Is Where The Plant Grows“His spirit responds to his country's spirit....he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes.“—Walt Whitman, PrefaceIn Europe, most people dislike the highly invasive Himalayan balsam. It is spreading aggressively across the continent, suffocating potential plant diversity while suffusing whole areas with a sweet and musty smell. My response to the plant is quite different. I adore everything about it. Its pink-purple flowers bending to the ground like little bells, its toothlike glands, rain dropping from its leaves, and especially the way its oval-shaped seed pods impatiently explode when I touch them with my fingers. And then the way my fingers smell afterwards—I could go on and on. This plant grew right in front of my family home. It was everywhere: Next to the pathway,...
- 9/27/2022
- MUBI
Ivana Miloš, The Paper Flower (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage on paper.Overcoming Naturei’m gladmy grandfather Kadmos named this place sacred,I’m gladhe keeps it clean.I myselfplanted it all round with vines—Dionysus in Euripides' Bakkhai (translated by Anne Carson)There are some films that come back to me on sleepless nights. Govindan Aravindan’s Chidambaram (1985) is one of them. It keeps me awake because it questions my ideas of right and wrong. It’s a very simple film, yet it centers around nothing less than the complexities of power, love, and nature. This treasure of Malayalam cinema, beautifully shot and set in the high ranges of the Western Ghats, reveals its plot like a moralistic fairy tale.Chidambaram focuses on three men and a woman. One man, Muniyandi, is a worker, a powerless and fearful serf at a plantation owned by the government. The next, Sankaran, is an intellectual,...
- 8/15/2022
- MUBI
Ivana Miloš, Poppy of the Underworld (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage with poppy flower heads on paper.Sleeping Beauty"And now my beauties, something with poison in it I think, with poison in it, but attractive to the eye and soothing to the smell . . . poppies, poppies, poppies will put them to sleep."—The Wicked Witch of the West, The Wizard of OzThose who came back from the cave of Hypnos, god of sleep, couldn’t tell their kings and families waiting in the world above about its entrance, which was covered with bright red poppies drawing water from the flowing stream of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. They simply forgot or were found in a strange trance mumbling in foreign tongues, somnambulant shadows of their former selves, wearing a distant but happy smile on their petrified faces. When faced with the seductive, herbaceous plants, which tilted their head to the ground...
- 8/15/2022
- MUBI
Ivana Miloš, A New Fern Is a Fern Is a Fern (2022), monotype and nature print on paper.The Rule Of Names She was closeAnd she held me very tightly'Til I asked awfully politely“Please, can I call you her name?”(…)She said, “I'm really not supposed to, but yesYou can call me anything you want”—“Cornerstone,” Arctic MonkeysIt’s a fitting coincedence that Nicolaus Ingemarsson, who lived and worked as a pastor and amateur botanist around 1700 in Småland, a province in southern Sweden, adopted a nickname, Nils, and a new Latin surname, Linnaeus. This ambivalent relationship to names continued with his son, the famous botanist Carolus, who himself was referred to as Carl von Linné. Linnaeus the younger became the so-called father of taxonomy, famous for classifying plants. He created the naming system that uses two names to describe a particular species: genus and species. A cinnamon fern, for example,...
- 6/27/2022
- MUBI
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