BSA Film Friday: 04.17.20 / Dispatch From Isolation # 26

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. Vegan Flava – Signs on the Surface

BSA Special Feature: Vegan Flava – “Signs on the Surface”

Yes, we just passed the Easter/Passover holidays, and many parts of the Northern Hemisphere have already burst into Spring.

In Sweden, it takes a little longer to get to seeing flowers and new grass.

Street Artist Vegan Flava shares with us the product of a full winter of communing with a frozen lake – and finding a way to bring his street art skillz to the ice. Today in one video we present a sizeable compilation of various installations he did when the water was frozen, piled with snow.

He calls them “direct actions”.

“In these pieces I’ve mostly used biodegradeable chalk spray,” he says, “a shovel and ash on the ice and snow.” It’s good to know that he is caring for the earth while making his mark upon it.

In an eerily familiar way, the experience of being out there feels like many people feel right now in quarantine – free with their expansive thoughts and ideas on a never-ending canvas, but not quite comforted. With each text message and skull rendering in the snow, these actually begin to look like graffiti tags, enormous hidden clues to a larger story.

HEAL – Human Earth Animal Liberation. It’s a big aspiration, writ large across this lake. This is just one of his texts, his poems, his urgent slogans.

“With the winters’ first snowfall, billions of unique crystals fall in slow motion and cover the landscape,” he says. “It looks like a gigantic sheet of paper. It is beyond belief to be able to walk across the lake during the winter – the same that we swim in during summer. If these phenomena weren’t real, I would dream of things such as this and wish they existed.”

Vegan Flava – Signs on the Surface

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