Look up! I’m No Canopy – I’m a Messenger
Details
Artist: Sanja Anđelković
Title: Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger
Year: 2022
Duration: 17 minutes
Medium: Single-channel video
Credit: Sanja Anđelković, Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger, 2022. Commissioned and partly produced by 59th October Salon. Courtesy October Salon Collection. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI'25 by Kulturni centar Beograda (Cultural Centre of Belgrade), Serbia.
Written/Composed/Created by Sanja Anđelković. Co-composed/ sensory percussion by Lav Kovač Cicadas. Chamber choir: Živan Popović, Ivana Nožica, Branislava Zagorac, Vuk Popović, Vlado Ilić, Nataša Berić, Eleonora Vojnović, Sanja Anđelković Conductor: Živan Popović Costumes: Jana Stankovski
Winner of the 59th October Salon Special Art Award.
Look up! I’m No Canopy – I’m a Messenger (2022)
Sanja Anđelković
Selected by Cultural Centre of Belgrade, Serbia
Imagine a tree canopy – you in it. Far above the ground. Sounds of leaves crunching from the wind surround you. It is hot and you have just come out from above the ground. After 17 years spent gathering impressions, sucking on tree roots. You are well rested. Ready to sing. And so you do...coming from the belly of the earth, you bring knowledge. An enchanting yet unknown frequency. You have heard the Earth move. You have inspected it. You bring riddles, speculative prophecies. You would have brought them, if you haven’t been M.I.A. A heave! Long awaited to be heard.
Look up! I am no canopy - I am a messenger is a work that takes particles of different eras, but also different disciplines. It looks into speculative zoology/ Entomology, but predominantly the historical/biological attributes of Magicicada septendecim while in a parallel manner analyzing an Orthodox chant. The specific brood XI is believed to be extinct since 1954. There were speculations about brood being found again in 1988 - these speculations were never confirmed.
The work draws a strong reference from a book Insect singers: A natural history of the Cicadas (1929). It creates its own new hybrid myth. An insect-morphic orthodox prophecy. A reincarnation of Brood XI (whose year of coming out from underground would be biologically- historically 2022) who has come to seduce us into an act of courting the world with an act of the most romantic call- giving out the speculative prophecy. Translating a new hybrid myth, from these sentinel species, we bring news of climate - love in the era of scarcity. Now, finally, we are able to understand the frequency.
Music and text for this experimental prophecy were written using references from the Orthodox chants, but deconstructed towards a different context, riddle - like, abstract thoughts about climate change, famine, anxieties, etc. Behind every choral composition, there is a myth of our time connected to each "calling/message".
Artist Q&A
What does a democratic, international film programme such as Artists' Film International, mean to you as an artist?
In the current polarized societal tensions, any kind of sign of democracy and attention to openness is valuable. It means that there are still spaces and events that are resisting the current “right” narratives and that the importance of fighting for a free civil society with basic human rights is platformed. It is important to keep art free and to give platforms and lead institutions towards their democratic potentials. So to participate in such platforms is always a relief rather than a privilege as privilege would mean we came to an understanding that nothing can be changed or challenged.
What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
Honestly, three things: climate change, overcrowding of objects, recourses. To elaborate more on the three things: I guess the first two things go hand in hand… so climate change and over-crowdedness drive my work in the direction of not only questioning the material but modes of production and everything else behind it. I am aware that electricity comes as a cost too, but am working on realizing how to minimize my impact by not minimizing my ambition of a good quality aestheticly affective work. -so to be continued on that matter. As far as resources go, it also came to ambition and expression that needed more that just a 2D realization, therefor, the cheapest option for me to realize my works direction is to learn 3D animation and create worlds that at the time I didn’t have the privilege to, for instance, create in a theatre. My work is therefor questioning the medium it is presented in but also exploring the potentiality to evoke emotions and in a sense “fake” states.
Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
As I work in speculative realms of art, I feel like the whole fabulative potentials, be it real or not, or produced in a wake or non wake state is highly appealing. Altered states of reality for sure give a new space, new ideas, new outlook and a new vision above all.
Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.
The main reference would be: Insect Singers, a Natural History of the Cicadas by J. G. Myers, and then others like Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology by Thimothy Morton and so on…
What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
Currently my PhD in Artistic research and expansion of the ideas on religion and its de-construction through a multispecies narratives and fabulation. Non-human languages and deconstruction of human knowledge through the ancestral non-human knowledge. The possibilities to think through “altered” states that for me represent the transdisciplinarity and its potential in thinking through already established forms.
Sanja Andjelkovic, Look up I m No Canopy I m a Messenger, performance in the University Library in Belgrade, 2022. Commissioned and partly produced by 59th October Salon. Courtesy October Salon Collection. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI'25 by Kulturni centar Beograda (Cultural Centre of Belgrade), Serbia.
Sanja Anđelković, Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger, 2022. Commissioned and partly produced by 59th October Salon. Courtesy October Salon Collection. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI'25 by Kulturni centar Beograda (Cultural Centre of Belgrade), Serbia.
Sanja Anđelković, Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger, 2022. Commissioned and partly produced by 59th October Salon. Courtesy October Salon Collection. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI'25 by Kulturni centar Beograda (Cultural Centre of Belgrade), Serbia.
Zorana Đaković Minniti, Associate Director for Programs, Curator (CCB), says:
Sanja Anđelković is an audio-visual-textual artist of the younger generation, who creates semantically and formally multi-layered visual-narrative works that leave a strong emotional impression.
Her speculative choral scores Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger performed in 2022 in the form of a choral performance in the reading room of the University Library in Belgrade have now been translated into a computer-generated video accompanied by a book of stories.
In this work, we can primarily hear what a human sounds like when serving insects and how the texture of their sound changes in relation to the Orthodox chant, intended to preach to humans from the perspective of a person transformed into insects. Namely, after years of studying cicadas, these small flying insects become bearers of a prophecy about a possible future, revealed through music composed and performed by the artist along with her colleagues from the church choir. Five choral score is accompanied by a story, i.e., a “speculative future myth” entitled Voice, Water, Fire, Consciousness-Air and Hunger and invite us to join and finish a dream. I court you – Look at me – Join me
In the present, the world is in complete disarray and we constantly ask ourselves if we have the capacity to even imagine a forum in which a group of entirely equal beings participates?
One possible idea about this kind of world is developed through artistic fiction in the work Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger and another in the faculties and streets in Serbia in the last few months that was initiated by the students.
This work, like Sanja’s entire practice, is based on research into knowledge systems, archives and collaborations. Through performance, animation, installation, sound, video and text, Sanja Anđelković analyses systems of historical information within a documentary-fantasy-speculative practice, approaching the topics of political ecology, history and everyday life. This work could be someone’s dream.
Details
Artist: Sanja Anđelković
Title: Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger
Year: 2022
Duration: 17 minutes
Medium: Single-channel video
Credit: Sanja Anđelković, Look up! I’m No Canopy– I’m a Messenger, 2022. Commissioned and partly produced by 59th October Salon. Courtesy October Salon Collection. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI'25 by Kulturni centar Beograda (Cultural Centre of Belgrade), Serbia.
Written/Composed/Created by Sanja Anđelković. Co-composed/ sensory percussion by Lav Kovač Cicadas. Chamber choir: Živan Popović, Ivana Nožica, Branislava Zagorac, Vuk Popović, Vlado Ilić, Nataša Berić, Eleonora Vojnović, Sanja Anđelković Conductor: Živan Popović Costumes: Jana Stankovski
Winner of the 59th October Salon Special Art Award.