GREEN HELL IS THE NEW HEAVEN: Timisoara in the Anthropocene (Stefan Tiron and Mihai Salajean, 2012, ***English Subtitles Included***)
We are proud to present this re-mastered version & with a brand new soundtrack (courtesy of selfmademusic.ro).
This shocku- wildlife video is a follow-up on a post-invasive hyperdensity guided tour trough Chisinau I started with Vadim Tsiganash in 2010, tracking an invasive species spread trough the capital of Moldavian Republic (*amply documented on ghettopalm). The Geen Hell is the New Heaven was filmed under extreme climatic conditions in one of the most torrid summers on record. This made it the almost perfect - future NOW investigation. Two weeks into the merciless sun, slightly hallucinating from the heat stroke, dehydration and a lot of ‘asphalt yoga’, we followed trough shiny corporate parking lots & under old railway bridges some of the extremophile denizens including TOH; tree of heaven of our teratophytic dreams & vivid prophecies.
Coincidentally A. altisima is one of the most bitter plants containing ailanthone - a quassinoid - which are some of the most bitter substances in nature (50times more bitter than quinine). Wormwood in its ancient biblical reference signifies bittnernes לענה (la’anah) which also means “curse" in Arabic and Hebrew(or Chernobyl in Ukrainian). This ambiguous and ambivalent (mostly malevolent) bio-conspiracy involves a pretty smelly escaped Chinese ornamental (臭椿; pinyin: chòuchūn; literally: “foul smelling tree” in Chinese), innocuous for most people and rogue organism for bio-conservationists (as most branded invasive/alien species) is for us truly a prophetic & eschatologic plant, almost like the wormwood in the Bible. Aillanthus altissima has been seeded into the mythic future-present of our speculative fictions, and possibly into most Mega-Cities of Tomorrow after it has cunningly seduced botanical hunters via proxy of biocapitalist profit dreams, exotic lust and high pollution tolerance. In our final gesture - we potted the TOH saplings, trying to invite them back into unwilling ‘culture’, a process that is always masked, camouflged, giving it away for free(from post offices to life insurance companies and cultural capital HQ) - and advertising it as perfect office plant.
The whole docu starts with a nod to 2000AD comics and to a future naturalist from MegaCity One modelled on Sir David Attenborough…
Suffice to say the video was made under the auspices of the Waiting Spaces I