Alice Bucknell. The Alluvials

MAD (Madrid Artes Digitales) will host the project The Alluvials by North American artist and writer Alice Bucknell, that leverages ecological theory, speculative fiction, and posthuman game design to explore the politics of drought and water scarcity.

Its narrative is told through a variety of nonhuman and elemental perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city’s celebrity mountain lion, P-22. Spread across seven chapters and as many worlds, the film oscillates forwards and backward in time, exploring multiple possible futures and revisited pasts for the region in order to ask its audience to consider their role in the present reality of a heating planet. 

The project was commissioned by mudac (Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts) in Lausanne, Switzerland, with additional funding and production support from transmediale and Arts Council England.