Fractured Earth is a 3 channel video installation that explores diffraction as an artistic and theoretical operation within the field of film portraiture. Drawing on feminist new-materialism and critical posthumanism, it approaches portraiture not as a reflective device but as a diffractive configuration in which embodied experience is reconfigured, fragmented, and reconstituted. Such an approach challenges the stability of a coherent spectatorial position and foregrounds a cinema rooted in ontological indeterminacy. By challenging phenomenological accounts of film, the project situates itself within current debates in critical posthumanism.
The film portraits a rural female brick-maker in Misiones, Argentina, juxtaposing documentary images of her labor, a speculative future ecosystem inhabited by ceramic entities functioning as survival infrastructures, and scientific examinations of mud as fossil matter. These heterogeneous temporal and material layers operate as a diffractive dispositive, inviting the viewer to engage with shifting perceptual dynamics and to participate in the generative construction of the portrait.
Mud serves as the central material and conceptual axis: simultaneously productive and destructive, it embodies the tensions between labor, ecological crisis, and forms of rural precarity. Its tactile presence introduces a corporeal dimension that mediates the relationship between viewer, image, and spatial configuration. Through this material lens, the film addresses broader socio-ecological dynamics—informal economies, feminist labor, environmental vulnerability, and multispecies interdependence—positioning the work within urgent global debates on sustainability and survivability. By integrating artistic production and theoretical reflection, the project contributes to contemporary artistic research and proposes diffraction as a critical operative model for posthuman cinema.
Project Lead : Florencia Almirón
Camera: Camila Costa, Georgina Pretto, Florencia Almirón
Edition: Lautaro Colace, Manuela Aguilar
Production: CASA Productora Misiones Argentina
Cooperation Partner: IFA Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
