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 a contemporary urban landscape. As the narrative cycles through recursion, the woman’s husband attempts to interrupt, questioning the disturbing history and trying to place it in historical time. Though the story references distant events, its setting and telling raise anxieties related to cycles of memory and forgetting.

Filmed at docks in Bergen, Norway using panoramic animation, The Last Volcano juxtaposes a peaceful and prosperous urban landscape with an eighteenth-century account of widespread death and crop loss caused by an Icelandic volcanic eruption. The work was filmed during the 2011 Eyjafjallajökull eruptions that disrupted European air and transport systems.

A blind date between an American epidemiologist and a Norwegian woman unfolds over a transatlantic Skype call. Trying to impress his potential paramour with his work on contemporary epidemics, the clumsy American steers the conversation disastrously toward the plague and the long, devastating historical memories it carries.

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

A Scottish geologist and a Norwegian chef working on an offshore oil platform discuss a 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 once triggered a cataclysmic tsunami that devastated eastern shores of the British Isles and helped sever the land link forming the English Channel. The narrative of that wave is related here to two contemporary contexts: the 2011 tsunami in Japan and studies of tremors caused by recent oil drilling. The film asks whether the rush to drill in the deep seas off Norway and Scotland might, directly or indirectly, lead to earthquakes, landslides, or great waves.