Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson collaborated on this film, which viscerally confronts issues of perception and process. The action of the film is direct: Holt walks through the tall grasses of a swamp while filming with her Bolex camera, guided only by what she can see through the camera lens and by Smithson’s verbal instructions. The viewer experiences the walk from Holt’s point of view, seeing through her camera lens and hearing Smithson’s spoken directions. Vision is obstructed and perception distorted as they stumble through the swamp grasses. Swamp “...deals with limitations of perception through the camera eye as Bob and I struggled through a muddy New Jersey swamp. Verbal direction cannot easily be followed. As the reeds crash against the camera lens blocking vision and forming continuously shifting patterns, confusion ensues.” (Nancy Holt)

“Serpent River lies in what seems like unspoilt territory in North Ontario. White-water rivers crest elemental rocks. But Serpent River springs out at a Uranium Mine and its tailings (radioactive waste). The buildings of this self-styled  ‘Uranium Capital of the North’ are the Rio Tinto Zinc Company. Film begins and ends suspended in panes of ice. It is winter. The woman worker moves through an icebright, cosmetically clean-looking town. Middle of the film is fiery and sulphurous: these are the toxic fields of the Acid Plant, built on native Canadian land, to serve the ‘leaching out’ of Uranium. The purity of the river and the innocence of the children playing on the ice, is mutated.” (Sandra Lahire)

“Eigenlicht examines the purely visual characteristics of fluorescent minerals, which absorb UV light and transform this invisible light into visible colours. Each mineral identifies itself by its individual colour, thus communicating to us about their composition and making it possible to trace their history by using strictly formal tools.” (Melvin Moti)

“Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. Towns became cities under its patronage, Persian kings entertained guests with its fireproof nature, and centuries of industry raked in the profits of its global application. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in waiting. Yet the asbestos industry has far from left us with extraction from the soil transforming to extraction from our walls. We are now faced with two options: to remove this material from our homes and start anew, or to build upon its residue. Removal is a dangerous and costly operation. So often we choose to live amongst it instead, choking out our walls with plastic tarping: the failed promises of modernism literally entombed all around us. Shot in the mining township of Asbestos, Quebec, home to the world’s largest asbestos mine that only stopped extraction in 2012, the film is a meditation on the entanglement of the fragility of bodies, the nonlinearity of progress, and the persistence of matter.” (Sasha Litvintseva & Graeme Arnfield)