SPRING RESIDENTS 2018
emilie slater
(United States)
The Museum of Prophecy
Super 8 and 35mm stills transferred to video
The Museum of Prophecy was filmed in Skagästron, Northern Iceland over the course of several months. The title is the same as the town’s only museum where our narrator, Dagný Marín, has faithfully operated for the last decade. MOP explores the mythical lore of a small town as it transitions into another season of eternal night. The history of this place and its past residents still inform the lived experiences of the few inhabitants it has left and brings to light the power of collective memory through storytelling. Museum of Prophecy urges the viewer to know Skagästron as Icelanders do even if the means trusting what you can’t see in front of you.
Emilie Slater is a scholar and multimedia artist originally from Philadelphia. She received her master's degree from the University of Massachusetts and in 2017 was an ethnographic research scholar at the University of San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Prior to her Masters Emilie received a BA from Bennington College in Anthropology and Visual Arts. Her artistic practice sits at the intersection of academic scholarship and experimental art, pulling each to create new forms in visual ethnography. Projects include a dynamic range of cinematic mediums including 16mm, 8mm, super 8, VHS and DSLR often shown in exhibition formats. Within these parameters, she is probing relationships between connection and separation, similarity and difference, self and other.