I have composed the score for the Feature film COSMOGRAPHIES
Cosmographies is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert and to Aotearoa.
In Atacama the film engages with numerous ongoing life-and-death struggles for land and water justice led by Indigenous communities, activists, and scientists in this old, vital yet scarred desert. Through interviews and conversations, the film depicts centuries old and ongoing forms of social injustice and ecological degradation to weave a critical allegory against the renewed commercial impulse of a new space age rampaging in the 2020’s.
Xuê is not returning to Earth. She reads fragments from a diary she has titled Cosmographies. As she contemplates her own death on Mars (becoming stardust) Xuê slipstreams one final time to visit her younger self in Rotorua, Aotearoa, during a cold August night in 2003, when Earth and Mars were at their closest in 60,000 years. The film brings a message urging us to support land and water defenders in the Atacama desert and to rethink the cosmos not as a frontier to conquer, but as a delicate ecology to which our planet is intimately and ancestrally connected.
Produced in consultation with Toconao Indigenous Lickanantay Community, Salar de Atacama, Chile.
Juan Francisco SalazarPERFORMANCE
Victoria Hunt
James Peter BrownFIELD PRODUCER
(AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND)
Victoria Hunt
Juan Francisco Salazar
Victoria HuntEDITOR
Rowena CroweLOCATION SOUND RECORDING
Moe Clark
Juan Francisco Salazar
CULTURAL ADVISORS
Félix Galleguillos Aymani
(Lickanantay)
Rosie Te Rauawhea Belvie
(Māori)
Alejandra Canales
Juan Francisco SalazarCAMERA
Juan Francisco SalazarFIELD PRODUCER (CHILE)
Valentina Figueroa
COSTUME DESIGN
Flora Vilches
Victoria Hunt
Boris Bagattini
Matthew Stegh
Samara Davis
Juan Francisco Salazar
For more information please visit : https://cosmographies.info/