Anyox

Jessica Johnson & Ryan Ermacora – Director’s Statement

The colonial project of British Columbia is inextricably tied to the economic interests of resource extraction industries. The provincial and federal governments have largely functioned to merely support these projects, beginning with the initial dispossession of Indigenous Peoples’ land to the atomisation and subversion of workers collective power. This has often been accomplished through the use of police and military force. Anyox looks at this phenomenon, by focusing on a micro-history of a remote company town and the sparse archival record that surrounds its brief existence as a resource extraction hub. Rather than drawing a sequential historical record, we aim to embrace the ephemeral nature of this town and the archive that represents it.

When the price of copper fell in the 1930s, the company simply walked away from this site of environmental waste, leaving behind roughly 20 million tonnes of slag, while the Canadian government silently stood by. Through a reclamation project, the two current residents of Anyox incrementally harvest value from the abandoned slag pile, a project which will far exceed the length of the time that Anyox was an active company town.

Shot on both 35mm and 65mm film over the course of three years, Anyox represents a continuation of research into the resource extraction industries of British Columbia that our short form projects have explored since 2014. Working at the intersection of photography and cinema, we’ve embraced the generative structural limitations of early cinema to temper the pace of our production, thereby imbuing every cinematographic choice with deep consideration and structural intention. Building parallels through past, present and potential futures, we aim to represent the aesthetics imposed on the landscape—conditioned by the dominant perspective of the time regarding the relationship between industry, habitation, and the environment.