A collaged conversation around the ruins of the Sutro Baths, a massive San Francisco bathing complex turned to dust inside of a century. The site of the baths is the nexus, but the conversation wanders.
Ancient history, silver mining and American empire, a pool cleaning startup, the arrow of time, the origins of cinema, speculation and land, property and enclosure, Millennium Tower, mass media and William Randolph Hearst’s Castle, technics and civilization, gilded age populism, Ramaytush Ohlone cosmology, recursive evolution, arson and the ever-living fire, if rocks could talk, the giant camera and its cosmic eye, the ocean, the mysteries, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.
Formally, the project is a collage of site studies, interviews, archival and contemporary media, and newly recorded super 8 and animation. It aims to trace genealogies without enclosing them, and to lay out a broad web of contexts for thinking about material histories, time, power, and nature.
Watch the teaser below: