The Catastrophe Trilogy

A story of a catastrophic volcanic eruption and its aftermath is twice told by a woman before the slowly turning image of contemporary urban landscape. As the narrative cycles through a recursion, the woman’s husband attempts to interrupt, questioning the disturbing history and trying to place it in historical time. Though the story references events of the distant past, its setting and telling raise anxieties related to cycles of memory and forgetting.

The Last Volcano was filmed at docks in Bergen, Norway using panoramic animation. The imagery of a peaceful and prosperous contemporary urban landscape is juxtaposed with an 18th century account of widespread death and crop-loss caused by an eruption of an Icelandic volcano. The work was filmed during the period of the 2011 eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that impacted European air and transport.

Technical: 6:02 Minutes, HD 16:9, Color, Stereo.
Available in both single-play and installation loop formats.
The Last Volcano was first released in the USA and Norway with English and Norwegian subtitles.
It has also been translated and subtitled in French.

The Last Volcano was published in Hyperrhiz 12.

Download The Last Volcano.

A blind date between an American epidemiologist and a Norwegian woman takes place on a transatlantic Skype call. While trying to impress his potential paramour with his important work in studying contemporary epidemics, the clumsy American steers the conversation terribly wrong, toward a discussion of the Plague and all the devastating historical memories it entails.

Cats and Rats/Rotter og katter was filmed on the Norwegian shoreline, on the banks of a US northeastern city, in a science laboratory, and along the shores of the UK, from which ships carrying plague-diseased rats were said to have come.

Cats and Rats was published in Hyperrhiz 12.

Download The Last Volcano.

A Scottish geologist and a Norwegian chef who works on an offshore oil platform discuss a certain strangeness in the waves, their changing spirits, and the last time a tsunami devastated the nearby shores.

Geological movement in the coastal shelf under the North Sea triggers a cataclysmic tsunami. The wave devastated communities eastern shores of the British Isles. The tsunami broke through the land link to cause the English channel. The narrative of the great wave that altered Europe is related to two contemporary contexts: the 2011 Tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, which introduced stories of great floods, and studies and examples of tremors caused by recent oil drilling. Might the current rush to drill in the deep seas of the northern shores of Norway and Scotland directly or indirectly lead to earthquakes, land-slides or great waves?

Direction: Roderick Coover
Writing: Scott Rettberg
Translation: Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg
Voices: Gillian Carson and Kristian A. Bjørkelo