E-flux Video & Film: staff picks, a new streaming program of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm, includes Raqs Media Collective’s “The Blood of Stars” (2017).
On view from Wednesday, January 6 through Tuesday, February 2, 2021 on e-flux Video & Film.
Click here to view the film: https://www.e-flux.com/video/370163/raqs-media-collective-nbsp-the-blood-of-stars/
“The Blood of Stars” invites us to think about the relation between the presence of iron—a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth—and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. Meanwhile, it reads meteorites for clues about the stains at the edge of every sharp blade that cuts into flesh, and registers resonances that ricochet between mining, militarism, and the mutations that mark a remote landscape.
Voices, of a woman and a child, converse and detail the presence of iron in the blood, the rusting of life and metals, and the sharp edge of a question. The cave folds in on itself in the footage, airplanes fallen from the sky rust, reindeer run, and a snowman waits for aliens. A poet states facts, in Hindi: “All the iron theirs to mine, the razor’s edge alone is mine.”
