Experience Inferno at the National Film and Sound Archive. Photo: NFSA.
Something — perhaps an alien — is spilling out of a screen at the National Film & Sound Archive (NFSA). At once ancient and futuristic, this creature is part of a thrilling new audiovisual installation by Paris-based Australian artist Mikaela Stafford.
Commissioned by the NFSA, Inferno is billed as a “sci-fi reverie that is eerie and ethereal; alien, yet earthly”. It was created in response to Stafford’s experience as a resident artist.
“For this project, I wanted to delve into my animation skills, but I knew it would need to be long-format. My animations usually go for 20 to 30 seconds, and for this installation, we were aiming for several minutes, so I needed a narrative,” Stafford says.
“During my residency, I sourced a lot of inspiration from the costume and small props department of the NFSA archive collection, and one movie in particular really sat with me.”
In the 1999 neo-noir sci-fi film Dark City, a protagonist named John awakens in a hotel with no memory, but soon finds he is wanted for a series of murders. While seeking answers, he discovers a group of aliens called the ‘Strangers’ who are controlling the city.
At the same time, she stumbled upon the film, Stafford discovered Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century narrative poem, The Divine Comedy, in particular, part one — Dante’s Inferno. Its protagonist had striking parallels with that of Dark City.
“He, too, wakes up and doesn’t know where he is, but begins his descent through the circles of hell,” Stafford says.
“Inferno is referential to that.”
Part sculpture, part audiovisual, all-consuming, Mikaela Stafford’s work invites audiences to immerse themselves in a world both ancient and futuristic. Photo: NFSA.
The installation includes five large perspex tomes with etchings illustrating the “inner workings” of Stafford’s protagonist. Beyond is the large, three-legged “something” — a curious sculpture, with a slug-like tail trailing from a 12-metre screen behind.
On screen is Stafford’s long-form animation. Sporting an iconic piece of digital garmentry — a billowing cloak — the protagonist navigates constantly shifting realities, transient identities and environments that switch up very quickly. Throughout, large orbs in the distance are symbolic of a north star the character is intuitively drawn to.
The work is heightened by a genre-bending, techno-transcendental soundscape created by composer and sound designer Kate Durman, who has incorporated a “personification” of the wind, whispering muffled messages to Stafford’s protagonist.
“By the end, the character descends into a black void, which alludes to a transcendence into the next phase,” Stafford explains.
“The work is intentionally disorienting because the journey is unclear.
“There’s no feeling that things are resolved at the end.”
For the NFSA, an organisation that is both the custodian of the nation’s historic audiovisual assets and an aficionado of contemporary film and sound creations, the work fits right in.
NFSA CEO Patrick McIntyre says fascinating things happen when contemporary artists like Mikaela Stafford get access to Australia’s history of recorded sound and moving image.
He points out that during her residency, Stafford trawled through large storage facilities, flipping through endless rows of AV, 35mm film, photography, and costumes while exploring futuristic themes.
“The resulting work is organic and ancient but also artificial and modern,” he says.
In fact, this could be said about the artist residency program more generally.
Composer and sound designer Kate Durman (left) provided the soundscape for artist Mikaela Stafford (right) in her work, Inferno. Photo: Cassie Abraham.
Stafford is the second artist in the NFSA’s residency program, joining renowned Australian audiovisual artist Robin Fox, who brought Tryptich and Constellations to the NFSA during his tenure.
The program was made possible last year when the NFSA joined several national institutions that received top-up funding from the government.
“We work with a lot of researchers, filmmakers and broadcasters on accessing the collection, but a lot of that demand is industry-driven. The residency program lets us give creative practitioners better use of our collection for exploratory, artist-driven use,” Patrick says.
It’s part of a broader move to make the NFSA more widely accessible to the community.
“As a cultural institution, we have a beautiful building we want to make available for people to gather in person, share experiences and talk together,” Patrick says.
“We want to present them with our archival materials in a way that’s surprising and vital. Not just the history of it, but the way we argue with that history, what it says about us, the beauty, wonder, paradoxes and, sometimes, the awfulness of what’s in the archives.”
Inferno runs until Tuesday, 16 November, at the National Film and Sound Archive.
