The Valley Pride
Southern California, bordering Mexico, in the Sonoran desert, the food industry is carrying out an atrocious ecological disaster in one of the most important agricultural areas of America. We are in the Valley Pride, in the regions of Coachella and Imperial Valley, where the Salton Sea is drying up; the consequences will be catastrophic also because of the polluting materials present in its seabed that will soon be dispersed into the air… Electronic soundtrack by Jung an Tagen.
The Valley Pride
Lukas Marxt
Austria, Germania 2023
14′
Direction
Lukas Marxt (*1983, Austria) is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Marxt has been sharing his research in the visual art environment as well as in the cinema context. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), at The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous International Film Festivals including Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival where he receiced the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018). Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea.