Marraq / Mud, 2022
8:14 minutes
Medium: 16mm film transferred to HD
Camera: Onno Petersen
Sound: Malu Peeters
Voice: Adam Lyberth

Marraq is the Greenlandic word for the mud that due to the melting ice flows through the landscape in large amounts. For five years, filmmaker Jasper Coppes worked together with a group of naturalists from Greenland on a film in which this undervalued substance eventually came to play a leading role. The sound and image captured on analogue 16 mm film

let the changing landscape speak for itself. The camera records how various forms of life have their own way of populating the world. In doing so, Coppes attempts to break away from the positivist (Cartesian) worldview that assumes that we have to investigate our surroundings from our own human experience by revealing a multitude of other (non-human) perspectives.

The film installation gives the floor to three protagonists. In the first place the landscape itself. The crystal-clear water that makes its way down through the grooves in the glacier; a perfectly round boulder that has deposited itself on the edge of a mud stream; the overwhelming force with which a waterfall crashes against the rocks; or the dry dust that is blown up along riverbeds – the landscape tells us clearly what transformations it experiences as a result of climate change.

The Greenlandic guide Adam Lyberth tells us how, due to the melting of the ice caps because of rising temperatures, mud is released that is deposited on the river banks. This mud that is so abundant in Greenland turns out to be so fertile that it is being shipped to Brazil to restore the exhausted soil. Marraq suggests that the negative consequences of climate change can also bring about positive solutions, as long as they are dealt with carefully, on the basis of knowledge and an intrinsic understanding of the landscape.

Finally, we meet a third protagonist in the form of a raven, who calls out to us from his flight. In Inuit culture, to which guide Lyberth is related, the raven stands at the origin of all life. Everything emerges from darkness, the raven is the first who frees himself from the dark universe and gives life to all other beings. He seems to keep watch over the changing landscape like a mother over her offspring.