GREECE / UK

Children of Unquiet, 2014. HI video with stereo sound, 15 minutes 37seconds.

Supported by Radio Papesse, Villa Romana Florence and Arts Council England

In the film Children of Unquiet, the artist Mikhail Karikis orchestrates a children's take over' of an uninhabited workers' village in Italy centring on the children's aural and physical interventions. The work features forty-five children who are growing up around a deserted industrial village, which was abandoned by their parents after the complete automation of the local geothermal power plant where they all used to work. The site is in the Devil's Valley in Tuscany, known for inspiring the hellish descriptions of Dante's Inferno and for being the place where the first sustainable energy power plant in the world was built. Sites like this offer an encounter with the gigantic forces operating inside our planet, revealing an immensity which is indifferent to the temporal dynamics of economics and capitalist demands for quick profit. The children's speculative and playful interventions and their concert with their natural and industrial surroundings generate the opportunity for individual and communal expression, challenging narratives of a failed human project and evoking different possible, desired or imagined futures.