Retold Journeys from The Arctic Book Club Exhibit
Retold Journeys from Amber Cortes on Vimeo.
NOTE: This video is 6 minutes long but is looped into a half hour piece. Repeats after six minutes.
Retold Journeys is a video and sound installation by Amber Cortes. It was created for the exhibition The Arctic Book Club: Artists Respond to An African in Greenland, curated by the Flux Factory and EFA Project Space in NYC.
Interleaving text from Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s travelogue “An African in Greenland” with footage from one the earliest documentary films ever made, Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, Retold Journeys casts personal impressions and experiences of a culture directly into romantically stylized, ethnographic narrative.
The sound piece that accompanies the video projection is an imagined arctic landscape found simultaneously above and below the surface of ice: linking the film images to an internal atmosphere of reflection that comes with traveling and encountering new cultures and places.
“I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find it was I who was being discovered.”
–Tete-Michel Kpomassie
“One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.”
–Robert Flaherty
















