Navigating past and present
Still from Requiem for Wind and Water, Amalie Atkins
Amalie Atkins at the Remai
by Jennifer Sparrowhawk
Amalie Atkins’ The Diamond Eye Assembly is comprised of three 16 mm films,The Diamond Eye Assembly, Transvection, and Requiem for Wind and Water, the installation weaves together a myth-like, poetic narrative depicting the experience of multi-generations of refugee prairie women. It is a hero’s journey, with the hero (or heroines in this case) being two twin sisters who set out to avenge their mother who was slain by a braid-severing, mysterious, witchy antagonist.
Hair serves as a symbol of identity in the films. And to be slain in the world of The Diamond Eye Assembly is to have your braids shorn. Without them you perish. The villain’s costume resembles the distinct onion-domed roofs of Slavic architecture, symbolizing the persecution of the Mennonites in Atkin’s ancestral nation of The Ukraine.
“The filmmaker skillfully and thoughtfully honours the experience of her displaced Mennonite ancestors while also subverting oppressive European gender binaries.”
An early image is of the grandmothers in a farmhouse kitchen in the 1950s. One is assisting the other by fastening an apron around her waist. The act is done with an air of genuine kindness. But one apron becomes two, then three, and soon the woman has tied what appears to be dozens of aprons onto her friend’s torso. The act of service becomes excessive, destructive. This speaks to the nuanced relationships between women in a patriarchal society – how they can at once be sources of support for one another and also (often unconscious) enforcers of burdensome gender roles and expectations.
Later we see our protagonists, the twins, as children intently playing with blocks under the kitchen table. As they construct columns and towers they are summoned to leave their creations behind in order to assist in the kitchen with a funeral ceremony. There is a presentation of shoes made of bread which may be delicious, perhaps even comfortable, but not very practical footwear, especially for ambitions like construction or architecture. Conversely, there is a scene where the now teenaged twins encounter a pack of 1960s women on roller-skates on a lone paved road in the country. Clearly, they are all taking the newly available birth control pill and reveling in the new-found autonomy over their wombs, and freedom to do things like roller skate with their friends in the afternoon instead of changing diapers or freshening up their husbands’ highballs. The twins don skates too and join in on the fun, but when they decide to check in at the homestead and try skating on the wild prairie grass they fall on their respective faces. Their modern footwear made for pavement makes it near impossible to traverse the prairie landscape.
Installation view, The Diamond Eye Assembly, Remai Modern, 2019. Images courtesy Remai Modern.
“Atkins illustrates the complexity of balancing evolving feminist ideals, independence, and empowerment with traditional prairie identity. If a woman chooses an alternative to heterosexual marriage and having children it can compromise her role in her community with painful consequences.”
Transvection offers a dreamy interlude from the narrative. The film is a loop of the twins floating through time. From childhood to old-age and back again, all the while conjoined at the arm. There is a sense of useful symmetry to Atkins’ narrative: an alchemizing of defunct traditions into modern tools.
In Requiem for Wind and Water we see the adult twins use their domestic skills not for sewing baby clothes, but combining them with their zest for building to construct a shelter for themselves while they devise a plan to slay their mother’s conqueror. The scissors used to cut braids are repurposed into a pair of field glasses to help track the very culprit responsible. The twins use their culinary skills not to have supper waiting on the table for their husbands’ weary return from the field, but to create a lavish banquet of intricate, delectable dirt-based dishes designed to tantalize and, if not fatally poison the villain, subdue her enough to confiscate the locks of hair of their ancestors she’s been hoarding on her person like a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey gone horribly wrong.
Once in possession of the plaited talismans, the twins reverently offer them to the swiftly flowing river, to be carried by wind and water into the future as a means to eulogize their ancestors’ lives and the hardships they endured to preserve the freedom, identity, and culture of generations to come.
Atkins’ The Diamond Eye Assembly is a beautifully crafted homage to her Mennonite lineage and an important addition to the canon of settler prairie mythology. The installation honours the past while criticizing its repressive shortcomings, helping pave the way for a brighter, more inclusive future for prairie inhabitants.
This article appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of Splice