“Volcanic Time Is About the Birth of Life, And From Its Destruction Comes Birth Again”: In Conversation with Malena Szlam

What happens when artists abandon the reflex to control – when they trade meticulous planning for an openness to chance, or when they prioritise direct experience in the living world over rational deductions? As Vincent Deville argues, many theorists today call for a return to sensuousness in knowledge-making, lamenting the disconnection of the humanities and scientific practices from direct engagement with the earth.¹ They highlight not only the role our sense-ability plays in shaping understanding but also advocate for an artistic approach to science that re-enchants – literally re-animates – nature through exposure and tactful contact. To this end, artist Malena Szlam, who was born and grew up in Chile and now lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, approaches the contemporary ecological condition as a crisis of our sensuousness and imagination. In her practice, there is an ongoing demand to reorient our capacity to attend and listen to the earth as a communicative entity, with analogue films that call for a reawakening of the senses and where the materiality of the medium itself becomes a conduit for encounters of an elemental kind.²

Malena Szlam. Photography by John Edmond

Crossing over from visual arts to cinema, Szlam first explored the phenomenological properties of light, creating light-projection apparatuses before transitioning to moving images. As a mestiza filmmaker,³ she stands at the intersection of multiple traditions of the visual medium – including cinema, photography, and installation – and draws on the intuitive processes and material affordances of celluloid film. To this end, images become a space where matter can speak, allowing nature to assert itself as an active voice: mountains, deserts, plateaus, archipelagos, volcanos, and trees emerge as intimate companions and collaborators. And these elemental bodies, often perceived as passive resources to be commodified and exploited, shift in Szlam’s practice to a presence that moves us physically and emotionally. 

Across her career – from Chronogram of Inexistent Time (2008), with its frameless photomontage sequences, to her second period of work beginning with ALTIPLANO (2018) and culminating in the recent three-channel installation Archipelago of Earthen Bones (2024), which interweaves 16mm imagery across the Ring of Fire⁴ – Szlam integrates Indigenous knowledge with western science in collaboration with Traditional Custodians, vulcanologists, oceanographers, and artists (including BJ Murphy, Kyle Slabb, Clive Oppenheimer, Susannah Buchan, and Lawrence English) to reimagine the relationship between humans and the environment.

Her practice, in many ways, unfolds where control gives way to encounter, where planning is defeated by intuition, and where the body’s engagement with the world takes precedence over abstract calculation. Through her films and installations, as she reflects in this conversation, knowledge is tested against the rhythms of the living earth: the textures of stone, the pulse of the atmosphere, and the rumble of molten soil – each inviting our perception to shift and come alive through animistic encounters. 

Following the screening of ALTIPLANO and the three-channel piece Archipelago of Earthen Bones at the University of Melbourne, Malena Szlam joins Cristóbal Escobar and Amanda Barbour in a discussion about her filmmaking process and how the concept of ‘volcanic time’ informs her thinking across geography, culture, and geology. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the unceded lands throughout Australia and recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters, skies and communities. We extend our respect to Aboriginal and Zenadth Kes Islander peoples and to Elders past, present and future. The work discussed in this interview was created across the lands of the Butchulla, Minjerribah, Quandamooka, Jinibara, Gubbi Gubbi, Turrbal, Yuggera, Wakka Wakka, Jarowair, Barrumgum, and Ngarabal Peoples, and the tribes of the Bundjalung and Githabul Nations, whom we acknowledge as the Traditional Custodians and Knowledge Keepers of the land on which this project was filmed. 

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We also acknowledge the Peoples of Wallmapu throughout the Southern Andes and recognise their cultural connection with the Ngen of volcanoes, forests, rivers and mountains. We extend our respect to the Mapuche cultures and their traditional lands. The work discussed in this interview was created across the territories of the Mapuche, Pewenche, Wenteche and Llaimache Peoples, whom we acknowledge as the Traditional Custodians and Knowledge Keepers of the land on which this project was filmed.

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Malena Szlam: The work I do tries to open up new ways of understanding our often-unknown connections to land – from both geological and contemporary cultural perspectives. The initial title of this research on Archipelago of Earthen Bones was Towards a Counter-Cartography of Volcanic Time, which began in 2020. The project was sparked by my filming experiences in the northern regions of what we know as Chile and Argentina, specifically in the Altiplano region – a land that stretches across both countries, despite the political border. Culturally, it’s a highly interconnected area. This terrain, which is the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita people, sits at an altitude of around 2,500 to 5,000 metres above sea level, making it an extreme environment. The film that emerged from that period, ALTIPLANO, marked the beginning of a collaboration with Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist based in the UK, and Adam Bobbette, a cultural geographer originally from Canada who has worked extensively in the UK and Indonesia, particularly in Java.

This initial research around volcanic time and alternative cartographies evolved into the broader project Archipelago of Earthen Bones, which is a multifaceted work that was filmed over 2022 and 2023. While it was filmed across multiple regions, the majority of the filming took place in Australia – northeast, west, and south of Meanjin/Brisbane, spanning Queensland and New South Wales, including the areas around Mount Beerwah and Mount Wollumbin, two mountains that structure the film, the project, and the research. The project involved collaboration with Lawrence English, who developed the sound using recordings drawn from the places where the film materials were gathered. He guided the understanding of sonic environments in the regions. Many of the sounds used in Archipelago extend into the infrasonic and the ultrasonic. The project was also supported by John Edmond, who facilitated its realisation. The first manifestation of Archipelago of Earthen Bones took the form of a three-channel sound and video installation with a total duration of around 60 minutes, weaving imagery across the Ring of Fire and connecting sites in southern Chile and Australia. The installation was shown in 2024 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, followed by the premiere of the first film in the series, Archipelago of Earthen Bones – to Bunya, at TIFF in September 2024. Currently, I am working in Paris on the second film, which focuses more on Wollumbin in New South Wales. 

Archipelago of Earthen Bones, installation at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

Archipelago of Earthen Bones, three-channel installation

I want to talk about two key moments that influenced the evolution of this project. One of them was the encounter with the Bunya tree during the journey of filming, traveling, and meeting people – particularly in relation to volcanic history and geological time. It shaped how I think about our connection to the environment, fauna, flora, and other human beings. I had no idea that the link between Australasia and the Americas would have anything to do with our being here now. But the entry point into that connection came through this tree, which is native to this land and also closely related to the Araucaria [Araucaria Araucana], a culturally significant tree endemic to the southern hemisphere – in Patagonia, across Argentina and Chile.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones – to Bunya

Archipelago of Earthen Bones – to Bunya

Growing up in Chile, I always thought the Araucaria was unique to our region. It was almost mythical, central in our imagination, and something we associated with home. But in truth, many regions across the Pacific Islands, Australasia, and South America – including Brazil – share sister species of Araucaria. These are basically living fossils, and across different cultures, they’ve played essential roles – not just ecologically, but also in ceremonies, cultural processes, and encounters between people. This realisation shifted the trajectory of the project. The first film to emerge from this journey was Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya, which marked the completion of the initial phases of travel and filming in 2022. Developed after the three-channel installation had become a central component of the project, the installation includes images of a young volcano in South America. On one screen, we see the lava fields of the Llaima and Lonquimay volcanoes in Chile – young lands that represent the genesis of a forest. This imagery stands in counterpoint to the ancestral forests of Australia shown in the installation, landscapes that took more than a hundred million years to evolve in a region without the volcanic activity that shapes the Pacific coasts of the Americas.

The installation allowed me to create connections – between places, species, and times – that we are not often taught to recognise. We’re usually taught to view the Americas, Australasia, Polynesia, and the Pacific Islands as separate, but in my view they are deeply connected, unified by the Pacific Ocean. This project grew out of a need to move beyond the framework of ALTIPLANO and MERAPI (2021), which I had previously completed, particularly because of what I learnt about volcanism and the formation of those regions. It led me to explore Australia as a volcanic landscape – something that isn’t a common perception here. In Chile, volcanoes are part of everyday life – you open your door and there’s a volcano. Earthquakes happen regularly. The relationship to geological activity is direct and embodied. In contrast, in Australia, I encountered narratives about Gondwana and Pangea – stories that also exist in South America, but which I never heard growing up, and don’t remember encountering in museums back home, no one told us about Gondwana for instance. So, the project remains open-ended – each piece leading into the next. It’s an evolving process. Volcanic time, to me, is about the birth of life, but also its decay, transformation, and destruction. And from that destruction comes birth again. It’s an eternal cycle. The Earth is alive – a living organism. The more we understand that, the more deeply and respectfully we can connect. My collaboration with scientists has been incredibly nourishing. They know how to read the signs of the Earth in ways that I, as an artist, am not trained to. That knowledge helps guide what I film, where I go, and whom I work with. 

Amanda Barbour: You’re often drawn to the edges of tectonic plates and geological formations. What is it that intrigues you about these landscapes?

Malena Szlam: I think it has a lot to do with our relationship, or maybe our lack of relationship, to the places we inhabit. Often, we don’t notice or understand the land, and that creates a distance between us and our environment. There’s a certain ignorance, or maybe a disconnection, from the land itself. And yet, when questions are asked – when there’s a curiosity or a willingness to engage with where we are, or where we’re traveling through – it opens up a broader understanding. What fascinates me most is the contrast between geological time and our present moment. When we look at a rock, the first thing we usually register is its materiality – just a rock. But if we’re able to really read it, to understand it, the rock speaks. We’re not necessarily educated in those terms anymore, not like we may have been in the past. But there’s knowledge and power in those materials. On a personal note, my ancestors on my mother’s side were from the Calchaquí Valley in Norwest Argentina, a region where I filmed part of ALTIPLANO. That connection was one of the reasons I felt drawn to go there, as a return, even though I didn’t – and still don’t – fully understand it. I see it as an analogy between geological time scales and our memories and untold stories of the human catastrophe and displacements. There’s so much that feels unreadable, impossible to completely grasp. It’s never about arriving at a fixed meaning; it’s always partial – fragments, impressions. But when we begin to imagine how these lands were formed, how long it took for them to become what they are, our relationship to those places changes. That’s the hope, anyway; not to tell a story directly, but to open up space for wonder and imagination. 

Tessa Laird: This isn’t really a question, but I was struck by your use of superimposition and layering. You mentioned geological time, and it made me think of how superimposition in film often allows for more than one time, or place, to be present at once. There’s this sense of scale beyond the human, sometimes even cosmological. And at the same time, your images are also very tactile and close-up. Could you speak more about that?

Archipelago of Earthen Bones – to Bunya

Malena Szlam: Yes, you’ve described it so beautifully. I think the key word here is experience. There’s a joy in connecting different places, times, atmospheres, textures, and materials within the image. Sometimes I understand these connections in the moment; other times I don’t understand them until later. This creative process relates to memory in my practice, not just remembering, but also the gaps in memory. What we forget, why we forget, and how we re-member. Superimposition becomes a space for these inquiries. It’s a sensorial invitation – both for me in the process of filming, and for others as when experiencing the artwork. Everyone makes their own film, in a way, in their own imagination. Some people might leave and forget or not hold to the work; and others might remember a specific image or inhabit the work for a long period in the case of the installation piece. That’s how we interact with the world too, through moments and impressions. And when we speak of land, memory becomes even more critical, remembering culture, the past, the present, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism. Memory is also shaped by territory – what it means to name and remember a place in Chile differs from how it is experienced in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. In the context of settler-colonial violence, erasure has been key: Indigenous presence has been suppressed through renaming, denial, and displacement. Genuine acts of remembering therefore involve reclaiming these erased histories and piecing together what has been fragmented, which is a healing process that continues in different ways across Chile, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Cristóbal Escobar: Your films have such poetic force, and that also carries the capacity to pull us into a different temporality, if only momentarily. I’m curious to ask about the tension between the poetic and the political in your practice. Many of the places you film are sites of extraction and colonial histories. Do you feel those two aspects, poetic and political, are ever in tension, or do they come together more organically?

Malena Szlam: That’s a very important question. First, I would say: everything is political, even silence. Sometimes we reduce the idea of “the political” to something narrow and literal. My work focuses on sensorial experience – how we perceive, how we imagine. And imagination is under threat today. So, in that sense, there’s a political dimension in defending sensorial, poetic, and imaginative spaces, of observing the world and us in a different light. There’s also a politics in choosing cinematic language – especially as we move away from analogue traditions, from nonfiction cinema, from experimental practices. Choosing to work in nature, in places constantly threatened by industrial activity and human pressure, might seem romantic, but to me it’s deeply political and urgent. Some people have shared that Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya evoke in them a sense of fear which makes sense as nature isn’t just about having a peaceful experience. It awakens something in us, an alertness. There’s pleasure, but also risk. That response is very physical, even ancestral. And of course, many of these places are under constant threat from mining and industrial extraction without even acknowledging the cultural importance that through millennia these places have witnessed. The ocean floor is being mapped using sonic data. Fascinating as that may be scientifically, we have no control over how that data will be used. And healing is another part of this. Healing is political. We’ve all lived through histories of genocide, trauma and displacement, across generations. Making space for healing – through art, through therapy, through reconnecting with the natural world – is vital for future generations. 

Amanda Barbour: Your work has been put in dialogue with Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno (2016)⁵ and you mentioned how perspective is political. I was struck by how Herzog always wants to shoot from the top of the mountain, directly Into the Inferno, whereas you often position your camera from a distance, more on the side, keeping a kind of respectful distance from what you’re filming. What informs your perspective when you shoot?

Malena Szlam: That’s a great question. Perspective can be approached in many ways. There’s the viewpoint – the physical and emotional position from which we observe – and then there are the preconceptions we carry into that experience. These preconceptions shift as the experience unfolds, and acknowledging that is part of the creative process.

The process of filming often involves improvisation. Decisions about where to go or whom to meet can shift or unexpectedly appear from day to day. Someone might guide you towards a place or introduce you to a person, and that shapes your journey. Especially filming while travelling, moving through space, and meeting cultural environments with deep layers of knowledge, it’s impossible to grasp everything at once. It’s about tuning into how the environment responds to a foreigner – not pushing but building a relationship. Herzog, of course, works on a different scale: financially, structurally, in terms of team size, and with enormous risk. He takes risks in ways I wouldn’t. There’s a moment in Into the Inferno where Herzog makes a reference to another of his film, La Soufrière (1977), where he encounters a man sleeping under a tree on an evacuated island. He wakes him up on camera and tries to connect, but the person resists. That situation highlights the possibilities and limitations of spontaneous, creative filmmaking in moments of catastrophe. 

And thinking about this brings me to the importance of materiality in cinema, which is also political. With analogue film, there’s a physical, tactile relationship with the medium. The camera, the film’s grain and its photosensitive surface reacting to wavelengths of light are in direct interaction with the world which is analogue.⁶ There’s also a sense of magic – the latent images waiting to be revealed during the chemical processes of developing film. Temporality is another dimension: analogue film structures time through frames per second, this is relative. I can experiment with continuous filming, frame-by-frame capture, or superimpositions, creating rhythms that collide, dance, and form a choreography. For me, essentially, analogue film allows imagining and communicating complex worlds. 

The camera’s position – how you approach a mountain or a volcano – is part of that creative and ethical consideration. Growing up in Chile, mountains were everywhere; even reaching the coast required passing through them, sometimes via tunnels. In Queensland, the experience was different – you travel over hills rather than under them. When I arrived in Australia in 2022, my desire was to explore volcanic time in a counterintuitive way. This continent has no active volcanoes, but its ancestral volcanic chains reflect continental movement. Scientific research suggests that the Cosgrove hotspot track, which is a 2,000-kilometre-long chain of ancient and extinct volcanoes stretching from northern Queensland to Victoria, is the longest above-sea-level chain of volcanoes observable in eastern Australia.⁷ My aim was to understand this geological and cultural landform without the dramatic imagery of erupting volcanoes. Unlike Herzog, I wasn’t seeking spectacular lava lakes. Instead, I wanted to honour the knowledge and sanctity embedded in the land and manifest the relationship of time scales and birth of life. 

Archipelago of Earthen Bones

Now, learning from Traditional Custodians was essential. Most of these mountains are not meant to be hiked. This guidance was surprising – I had never encountered it before. In Chile, hiking active volcanoes is common, even celebrated. Here, the cultural understanding of geography is different; it is about respect and ancestral knowledge rather than recreation or spectacle. Mount Beerwah and Mount Wollumbin are sacred mountains. When I visited, I knew that I was not going to enter certain areas, but that wasn’t my objective. My focus was on understanding the intricate connections between the mountains and the environment, their broader ecological and cultural significance.

Audience: When you mentioned the Araucaria and realised the shared plant life across continents, it reminded me how often Australian exceptionalism is taught, especially to white settlers. There’s this myth that our flora and fauna exist nowhere else. And that fuels a kind of nationalist thinking. But learning about those interconnections breaks that illusion. I also have a question about your process. You mentioned in-camera editing – how intuitive is it? Or is it something more calculated?

Malena Szlam: That’s a beautiful point about exceptionalism. When we break those illusions, we open up space for deeper connection to other places and other cultures. It’s a way of resisting isolation and nourishing interconnection. As for the creative process, I’ve been working with analogue film and photography for about two decades. For me, film is sculptural, a temporal material. You need to understand the material, much like a wood sculptor understands the wood veins. That knowledge shapes how you interact with it. I use 16mm film, Ektachrome reversal stock, which has a narrow exposure latitude – just two to three stops. I like those constraints. I don’t believe in the “right” exposure or the “correct” focus. It’s about using the materials – the mechanics, optics, atmosphere, light – to express something. I enjoy the process, and honestly, it’s labour-intensive, so joy is essential here. Rewinding film by hand, spending hours for a few seconds of footage…if there’s no joy, it becomes very heavy.

Over time, I’ve come to understand improvisation – not as randomness, but as something that emerges from deep familiarity with your materials. It’s about being free to respond to the moment. Sometimes I get an image in my mind – an impossible image that can only be created by constructing it through the film process. That fabrication, that sculpting with light and time, is central. Now, you don’t see the images right away, so you build them in your mind and senses. It’s a feeling, much like writing: you know when it feels right. A roll of 100ft film is about two minutes and 40 seconds, and it might take me three hours to film 20 seconds. So, the relationship to geological time is oddly fitting.

Cristóbal Escobar: There’s a dialogue in your work between modern science – particularly volcanology, oceanography, and the earth sciences – and ancestral knowledges that connect directly to filmmaking itself. In this context, cinema no longer operates as a technology of domination or a colonial tool of modernity, but as an animistic medium in which everything is alive and endowed with perspective, each element carrying its own point of view – allowing them to speak, as Ailton Krenak would say.⁸

Malena Szlam: That’s right, and all these systems of knowledge have their own beauty. Scientists translate observations and data into stories about the world’s genesis or environmental conditions. My approach is to remain open, creating links without relying on conventional storytelling. Observation and communication guide my work more than narrative. For example, in 2022, I met Andrew Rozefelds, Curator in Geosciences at Queensland Museum in Brisbane. He was studying a tree native of southern Chile and Argentina, the Nothofagus antarctica or Ñire, which is resilient to disturbances like earthquakes. This tree is related to the Nothofagus moorei or Antarctic beech endemic in Australia, remnants from shared geological history. That led me to explore the ancient Antarctic beech trees in Springbrook National Park and Lamington National Park, part of the Gondwana Rainforest remnants. These encounters steer me toward unexpected subjects to create unforeseen connections. In 2023, I returned to Mount Wollumbin in New South Wales and to Mount Beerwah, Coonowrin, and surrounding peaks, also known as the Glass House Mountains. There I met BJ Murphy, a Jinibara artist, unexpectedly in a café. He invited me to meet in Mount Beerwah the following day where he’s been educating visitors about the damage caused by climbing sacred ancestral mountain. These special moments, guided by prior readings about his work and activism, open possibilities for dialogue and shared knowledge. So, I’d say part of the process is to be attentive to the present moment. I don’t pre-plan in a traditional or fixed sense; the work unfolds as I go. This openness is a privilege of the scale at which I work. I believe in the importance of meeting scientists, custodians, curators, scholars, artists, whose visions permeates the work I do. I often view scientists as “artist-scientists,” observing and translating the world as a form of art. Historically, science and art were intertwined, not opposites. Cinema itself evolved from art and science – optics, anatomy, chemistry, and early projection devices. 

I’m fascinated by translating the world and engaging with what cannot be fully comprehended. It’s not about deciphering, but about following the unknown. This connects to perspective and materiality. I want my films to manifest invisible and inaudible frequencies to humans, light and sound that go beyond conventional representation. My desire is for the work to move past representation, toward presentation itself, more like an experience where people can inhabit a world through image, sound, and rhythm, rather than a story explained by dialogue or text. This approach, of course, honours interconnections (between plants, animals, lands, humans) and counters modern education’s tendency to separate objects, people, and nature. Human supremacy is challenged subtly, even when humans are not filmed directly. 

Amanda Barbour: There’s a long history of people anthropomorphising the natural world, from petro-masculinity⁹ to volcanoes being a site of both birth and destruction. How do you think about gender in your work?

Malena Szlam: I inhabit the world as I am becoming, rather than defining myself through categories like male or female. It’s more about forces, energy, and the ways I move through places and interact with people. My identity – as a woman, a South American, a migrant with a nomadic life – shapes how I perceive and engage with experiences. I experiment with expanding emotional relations to the world, going beyond binary gender notions. The work becomes a body of perception: cultural, physical, and historical identities mesh together to shape experience. The body is plural – multiple layers intersect with environment and context. 

Archipelago of Earthen Bones – to Bunya

And there’s also a political dimension to this. How we enter unfamiliar spaces and navigate cultural protocols often intersects with gender. Interactions with women, men, and communities are informed by awareness of these dynamics. Inhabiting a place is never about imposing oneself or a camera; it’s about communication, respect, and learning. Guidance from custodians not to hike certain mountains opened avenues for understanding and dialogue I otherwise would have missed. Also, gender connects to cycles and vulnerability. My body – menstrual cycles, physical and emotional states – integrates with the work. Filming is inseparable from life; moments of vulnerability, grief, or physical struggle become part of the creative process. The work can even be healing – for myself and, hopefully, for audiences as well. So, I would say that gender, vulnerability, and life experience are intertwined with creativity. Life is fragile, ephemeral, a spark. Recognising this fragility, embracing vulnerability, and being honest about experience are central to how I make and inhabit my films.

Endnotes