Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
Where the snow-fed Rio del Llano met the edge of the desert BY Maria Magnusson
Inspired by Robert Kinmont’s photographic series My Favorite Dirt Roads (1969) In 2019 I visited the geographical location, Pear blossom Highway in California which is near the Antelope Valley (the armpit of California). A place also known as The Socialist Ruins. Here, Job Harriman, a socialist lawyer who ran for Vice President of the United States, Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles, founded in 1914 the cooperative colony – Llano del Rio which means plain by the river. The colony flourished for four years between 1914 to 1918. The cooperative Llano del Rio was a pioneer in agriculture with alfalfa, corn and pear cultivation, among others, and has named the highway – Pear blossom Highway. The sound collage is based on Delia Derbyshire’s radio program for the BBC – Inventions for Radio Dreams from 1964, where where people describe how they dream of a specific place and its landscape.
Maria Magnusson is a Gothenburg (Sweden) based artist/experimental filmmaker whose work explores the relation between sound and the moving picture in experimental videos and short film. Magnusson completed a Master’s degree in Photography and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and Theory at the University of Gothenburg. She works with found footage, archival material, and combines analogue and digital filmic methods, examine subjects like memory, dreams, the unconscious. Magnusson has participated in artist residencies in Canada, Mexico and California to study and work with various analogue photographic/cinematic ecological processes and methods.To work site-specific and with the landscape is something she returns to and connects to her upbringing on the farm in Norra Björke.
Maria’s experimental films have screened at festivals, galleries and micro-cinemas including International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, LA FilmForum, Echo Park Film Center,The Alchemy Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, the Images Festival, Experiment in Cinema.
