Eitan Efrat and Daniel Mann present a talk titled Healing and Killing in the Underground, featuring a screening of an episode from their new film The Magic Mountain (2020). Thinking the surface of the Earth against its volume is tracing the very limits of representation. Underneath the ground, human bodies become surfaces upon which the land leaves its mark, imprinted directly into the cells and tissue. While the landscapes outside are captured and mediated in the form of postcards, paintings, snapshots and films that appeal to the naked eye, a rare energy leaks through the crevices in the stone below, before it is inhaled into the lungs, absorbed and consumed through the skin. Underground the body is the postcard of the subsoil.

London-based filmmaker and writer Daniel Mann explores how image production shapes perceptions of armed conflict, colonisation and climate emergency. His films have screened internationally, including Motza el hayam (Low Tide) (2017) about a military defector in Tel Aviv, which received the Best First Feature Award at Haifa Film Festival (2017). His current project concerns the Middle Eastern desert as cinematic site for war and annihilation.

Internationally shown artist Eitan Efrat engages in collaborative practice in making videos, installations and paintings that yield spatial and durational experiences in relation to film and architecture. Circumspect towards linearity, Efrat proceeds with a poetic treatment of collectivity. With Sirah Foighel Brutmann he is part of artist-run collective Messidor, questioning what it is that artists need.