Uncharted Territory from Christine Banna on Vimeo.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:

“Uncharted Territory” grew organically from multiple different artworks I was working on
simultaneously during my graduate studies. I was attempting to work through themes that
had been pervasive in my previous work around some morbid topics. It became clear to me
through my work that my next step had to be more personal and honest to move forward in
my practice. I thought about my own health struggles with extreme food and airborne
allergies and how even unintentionally it affected my artwork. I resisted this realization that my
work had always been more self-biographical than I consciously intended.

“Uncharted Territory” at its core is about the inevitability of death and coming to terms with
a near-death experience. I chose a story from my own experience of suffering from the worst
allergic reaction in my life. The experience of this particular incident
definitely stands out from the hundreds of times I’ve had a reaction. The stakes were
never higher than that Thursday night many years ago. This artwork involves visuals of both
fantastical and mundane scenarios of suffocation. The majority of the footage
takes place in two voids humanity is exploring: water and space. The scenes themselves
range from meditative to violent which are married together aesthetically through the color
palette and style. The scenes are appropriated from a wide variety of media ranging from
news broadcasts, video games, and Hollywood movies, but their true source is always masked
in the way that they are transformed, rotoscoped, colored, and sampled.