Critters

Yuki Higashino’s new film Extinguishment (2020) explores what awaits a society characterized by both a rapidly aging population and xenophobia. Taking Japan, the fastest aging country in the world, as its case study, the film examines the explosion of wildlife that accompanies Japan’s depopulation, and imagines a future where humans have been almost completely wiped out by aging coupled with an untold ecological disaster. The Japanese islands will be inhabited by thriving wildlife and autonomous robots originally built for the care of the elderly.

Program

Jean Painlevé, Sea urchins, 1958, 11 min
Ariane Michel, Sur la terre, 2005, 13 min
Laura Huertas Millán, The Labyrinth, 2018, 21 min
Yuki Higashino, Extinguishment, 2020, 19 min

Presented by Yuki Higashino, followed by a conversation with Sulgi Lie (in English) and a live set by Alexander Martinz

Yuki Higashino is an artist based in Vienna. He graduated from Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main in 2010. Exhibitions (selection): Public Images, Carriage Trade, New York (2020); Can You Feel It?, Last Tango, Zurich (2019); something about pictures, Rampe, Berlin (2019); The Dying Style, Contemporary Art Factory, Kyoto (2018). His writing has been published in journals such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and The Avery Review.

Sulgi Lie is a film scholar and Fellow of the Alexander v. Humboldt-Foundation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is author of Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and the forthcoming Gehend kommen. Adornos Slapstick: Charlie Chaplin & The Marx Brothers (Vorwerk 8, 2022).

Alexander Martinz studied Electroacoustic Composition and Transmedia Art. He teaches at the University of Applied Arts and lives and works as a composer and media artist in Vienna. He is interested in the different logics and traditions of audiovisual media, complex transformations of popcultural material can be considered a foundation of his work. Alexander Martinz contributed the soundtrack for Yuki Higashino’s Extinguishment (2020).