FILM

Urth takes its title from the Old Norse word suggesting the twisted threads of fate (as cited by Timothy Morton in his recent book, Dark Ecology) and has utopias — in particular the tension between a yearning for an idealized world and the impossibility of such a place as its subject. Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, it forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments, and visions of the future. Writer Mark von Schlegell contributes a text - read as voiceover to Rivers’s moving images - that considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.