%A Ursula BIEMANN %T The Video Essay as Geomorphic Tool %0 Journal Article %D 0 %J Landsc. Archit. Front. %J Landscape Architecture Frontiers %@ 2096-336X %R 10.15302/J-LAF-20180114 %P 148-157 %V %N %U {https://journal.hep.com.cn/laf/EN/10.15302/J-LAF-20180114 %8 2018-03-28 %X

In recent years, my videos have performed a shift from a global to a planetary scale. In pursuit of this new perspective where nonhuman actors begin to play an important role, my fieldwork has taken me to remote territories where fragile ecosystems have come under great pressure from the global resource extraction industry. In this article, I elucidate the two video works, Deep Weather (2013) and Forest Law (2014), to demonstrate how I use the video essay to create landscapes that are imbued with meaning beyond themselves. In the cinematic environmentalism these videos present and matter, physical and climatic processes no longer provide a dramatic backdrop for the narration of social events; they have moved to the fore to play the leading role, forming a world in which the human-Earth relationship is fragile, complicated, poetic, and intensely physical.