These two pieces depict two locations from the film that I'm developing. It focuses on the active landscape (Volcano, Landslides) and illusion.

Calarca is a place where one of the most ambitious construction projects in South America is taking place, a tunnel called la linea. There are massive bridges everywhere. The tunnel construction have caused a lot of environmental problems as well. The main character in the film has an auditory hallucination which progresses to visual hallucination, as more mountains are blown up. She sees geometric patterns over mundane sceneries.

Pijao is a nearby town which is very near the epicentre of the 1999 Colombian earthquake. The town has gone through catastrophes - from 1940s when the liberals where murdered country-wide, 1997 coffee crisis, 1999 earthquake, and 2001 Guerrillas attack. It is also the region which started the drug lord movement. I will base a big chunk of a new movie in this town. In the photograph, I quote the style of Ever Astudillo, a Colombian artist whom I deeply admire. His images are clearly based on photographic lens, with silhouettes of men blocking the point of view, with unexplained suspense. He died in 2015.

The other sets of photographs are from Nuqui, the coastal area of Colombia where I spent a lot of time writing. A perfect setting with the jungle and the sea. I was visited by a Canadian actor, filmmaker Connor Jessup. He was assigned by the Criterion Collection NY to make a documentary about me. The 5 diptych photo sets can function as a storyboard of a movie about a young man trapped in the jungle, just darkness and light that fascinates me. I used infrared camera for this set. Then there’s a video called ‘Memoria, Boy at Sea,’ that contains the geometric sketches, movement of water, memory, another kind of active landscape.  

(Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Detail pictures: