Vanessa Nica Mueller lives as a filmmaker & visual artist in Hamburg. In her artistic and poetic art films, she takes a documentary approach to questions of post colonial structures focused on layers of memory, identity and ecological crisis.
„The traces of inner and outer exile throw their shadows on empty walls.“ In her artistic films, Vanessa Nica Mueller deals with questions of personal and collective memory, the human being in relation to urban space and nature, the uncanny and the cinematic construction of inner states, as well as the tension between identity(ies), the familiar and forms of alienation. She spans the arc from inner navigations to a fragmentary mapping of environments and in-between spaces.
In her artistic research on fragile ecosystems, she is interested in the intersection of climate crisis, ecologic collapse and strategies of resilience and community in times of inhumanity. Starting from a documentary approach, she creates essay films that always contain an openness at the interface between staging and observation. She focuses on an essayistic and associative narrative style and combines digital film material with analog footage and archive material based on her wide research process.
Her latest film Landen had its world premiere at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam 2023 and the German premiere at the Exground Filmfest Wiesbaden 2023. Together with the film team, she received the award for Best Film Sound at the 13th FICBC BALNEÁRIO CAMBORIÚ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL in Brazil 2023 and in 2024 the Lichter Art Award at the Lichter Film Festival, Frankfurt. Her films PLATEAU, Halbe Nacht and Traces of an Elephant were screened at film festivals such as Intern. Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Belfast Film Festival, Werkleitz Gesellschaft Halle, CPH:DOX Copenhagen, Kasseler Dokfest, Viennale Wien, Kurzfilmfestival Hamburg, Stuttgarter Filmwinter and were presented in exhibition contexts, e.g. in the exhibition Fuzzy Dark Spot in Fuzzy Dark Spot at the Falckenberg Collection Hamburg (2019), at Galerie Kai Middendorf Frankfurt (2012) and at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof.
Landen
HD Video / 64:00 min / 2023
01:05 min excerpt
“Jamais-vu is the opposite of déjà vu. A place that is actually familiar is perceived as strange, unknown and new, she heard.”
LANDEN follows its female protagonist on her botanical journey from the german Wadden Sea to the coast of Lebanon. As she collects material along the shorelines for her herbarium, she witnesses the consequences of Lebanon’s economic collapse and disturbing decay. The collection of plants become her only constant navigation through fragile terrain. Along diverse ecosystems she loses herself between modernist architecture in Tripoli (Northern Lebanon) or at the banks of the Beirut River to find some hope for a future after the fall near a growing micro-forest project. A film essay where plants lead us through crisis and loss.
This cinemathique essay is about coastlines and plants, adaptation and change, resilience and community, about nature reserves, hyperinflation and strangly empty places.