VOLCANOES, MOUNTAINS, FORESTS: MALENA SZLAM AND JIAYI CHEN

Thursday, March 26, 6:00 p.m. | Artist Malena Szlam and filmmaker Jiayi Chen present a special evening of films and performances that use analog technologies to create intensely sensorial experiences—reorienting how we perceive landscape and time. Born in Santiago, Chile, and now based in Montreal, Szlam crafts striking visions of volcanic terrains—from the active peaks and high deserts of the Andes to Australia’s ancient formations—where striated superimpositions, saturated fields of color, and propulsive soundscapes render the earth as a living, dynamic entity of overlapping temporalities. Originally from Chongqing in southwest China, and now living between Chicago and Houston, Chen composes luminous films and multi-projector performances that attune viewers to forest ecologies, seasonal cycles, and reciprocal relationships among flora, fauna, and land. For both Szlam and Chen, analog film mirrors the elemental materiality of their subjects, while in-camera editing enables a practice of direct and responsive encounter. Together, their works accumulate like geological strata, layering spaces and timescales while reinvigorating sensory ways of understanding the natural world.

Followed by a conversation with Malena Szlam and Jiayi Chen and audience Q&A. Presented with support from Chicago Film Society and University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. 

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

Toronto International Film Festival’s Canada’s Top Ten Canadian Short Films, 2018 (ALTIPLANO)
Winner, Best Experimental Short Film, Melbourne International Film Festival (ALTIPLANO)
Grand Jury Grand Prix, 25 FPS – International Experimental Film and Video Festival (ALTIPLANO)

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Malena Szlam is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her films, installations, and photographs explore embodied perception and the material and affective dimensions of analog film processes. Attentive to the geopolitics of natural phenomena, her recent projects engage geology, earth science, and volcanology. Her work has been exhibited internationally at festivals and institutions including the Toronto International Film Festival; New Directors/New Films New York; Valdivia International Film Festival; Jeonju International Film Festival; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Open City Documentary Festival, London; and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Recent group exhibitions include Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific, Fulcrum Arts, Los Angeles and femmes volcans forêts torrents, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Solo exhibitions include Infra—, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal. Her award-winning film ALTIPLANO received the Best Experimental Short Film prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival and has been called one of the most significant landscape films of the 2010s. Her films are held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Jiayi Chen is an artist, filmmaker, and projectionist from Chongqing, China, currently based between Chicago and Houston. Working at the intersection of analog film, performance, and installation, her practice explores perception, translation, and environmental attunement. Through expanded-cinema and analog film processes, Chen approaches filmmaking as a durational and relational act. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally at festivals and venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; New York Film Festival; Cineteca Madrid; Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, Berlin; MONO NO AWARE, New York; Chicago Cultural Center; Harkat Studios, Mumbai, India; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Anthology Film Archives, New York.

PROGRAM

ALTIPLANO
Malena Szlam, 2018, 16mm to 35mm, 15:30 mins
Filmed in the Andean Mountains on the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita peoples in northern Chile and northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO unfolds within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and colored lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, the film reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon. Coupled with a natural soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, and Chilean blue whales, ALTIPLANO employs in-camera editing to produce ecstatic visual rhythms. Landscapes pulse and stutter, transformed through superimposition and 16mm pixelation into spaces that exist across multiple times simultaneously.

MERAPI
Malena Szlam, 2021, 16mm to 35mm, silent, 8 mins
A circumlocutory study of Mount Merapi in Indonesia, MERAPI is structured around the volcano’s rippling effects on its surroundings: smoke drifting through trees, rain breaking against its slopes, and the fertility of its soils. Equally attentive to the play of light through swirls of 16mm grain and atmosphere, MERAPI reflects on what it means to live within the volcano’s horizon near the densely populated city of Yogyakarta.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya
Malena Szlam, 2024, 16mm to digital, 20 mins
Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya traces alternative cartographies of time, using volcanic formations as a means to comprehend and express Earth’s dynamic geological history. Szlam trains her camera on a constellation of ancient landforms stretching across the Pacific, from Chile to Australia; her dazzling in-camera multiple exposures evoke the layered histories of Mount Beerwah, the Gondwana Rainforest, and the titular Bunya Mountains, as well as ongoing submarine volcanic activity within the Pacific Ring of Fire. The film’s visual environments are further deepened by field recordings and sonified atmospheres from artist Lawrence English.

“Like the volcanoes themselves, Archipelago is generative of new, as-yet-impossible spaces. With its saturated color palette—partly resulting from the refraction of sunlight through volcanic ash in the sky—the film provides visual sensations midway between photographic materialism and painterly abstraction.”—Michael Sicinski, MUBI

Mounds Above the Earth
Jiayi Chen, 2025, 16mm and 35mm double-analog projection, 7 mins
Mounds Above the Earth contemplates ecological cycles, perception, and environmental transformation, anchored in the rare simultaneous emergence of two periodical cicada broods for the first time in more than two centuries. The film follows the flicker of red—through the cicadas’ developing eyes, a blood moon, and an ancient fable.

See Through the Hollowed Blue Hellebore
Jiayi Chen, 2026, 16mm, 12 mins
Summer light scatters endlessly across river rocks, moss, and lichen, flickering over land breathing under its own memory. Shot in the remote wilderness of Lingít Aaní/southeastern Alaska, See Through the Hollowed Blue Hellebore draws from local oral narratives tied to glaciers and land, weaving echoes of Tlingit language into a reimagined sensory journey. Beneath each surface: a glacier receding, a body remembering.

As a Tree Walks to Its Forest
Jiayi Chen, 2025, Looping three-projector double-8mm and 16mm, 18 mins
Inspired by Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Chen’s As a Tree Walks to Its Forest immerses viewers in the topography of a wooded landscape. A mosaic of superimposed fragments, the work evokes physical textures—the roughness of bark, the tingling of dry grass, the teasing of gossamer, the blunt force of tumbling water, the flow of wind—and reconfigures perception of forest ecology.

ACCESSIBILITY

CATE events include real-time captions (CART). The Film Center is ADA accessible and equipped with hearing loops; for additional requests, visit saic.edu/access or contact cate@saic.edu.

TICKETS

$14 General public
$9 Students & seniors
$8 Film Center members
$8 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID

All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.

CONVERSATIONS AT THE EDGE

Conversations at the Edge is the Siskel Film Center’s award-winning series for innovative film and media art. From eye-opening screenings to unforgettable performances and talks, CATE is made possible through a unique partnership between the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, Video Data Bank, and the Siskel Film Center.