Sam Hamilton

David Attenborough Presents The Commodification of Culture / A Culture of Commodification (2014)

2 min 31 secSingle channel / transferred to Digital Video / 8mm / Colour / Silent

"'David Attenborough Presents: The History of Evolution / The Evolution of History' (2014) is a silent single-take super 8 film work shot in East Oregon’s Alvord Desert, an expansive, arid landscape that parallels the blank existence canvas through which humanity forges a tenuous pathway. A pathway built on the lofty foundations of ever evolving and shifting histories, ideologies, and technologies, that dictate how we orient our trajectory forward in time.

The film is part of an on-going series of single-take Super 8 gestural performance films under the David Attenborough Presents title. The series features the artist dressed as David Attenborough as a means of deconstructing ones own implicit relationship with - and responsibility to reconcile and confront - Western cultural imperialism. The reference to David Attenborough is a specific interrogation of how contemporary Western perspectives on what is and is not 'nature' still perpetuate—albeit more elusively—colonial attitudes across the globe."

Artist's statement

Other works in this series

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