PaLiNopSiA

Saturday 12th - Sunday 20th July 2025
Location: Alt_R

Most Dismal Swamp  /  Rustan Söderling

Screenings:
Most Dismal Swamp - 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙁𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙𝙨 (𝙨𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙧 𝙫𝙞𝙗𝙚𝙨 𝙘𝙪𝙩), (45:00), 2025
Rustan Söderling - 𝘽𝙤𝙘𝙠𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙣𝙚𝙣𝙨 𝙆𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙣, (10:52), 2025
Rustan Söderling - 𝙊𝙣 𝙇𝙤𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, (19:24), 2023

The films will be screened on rotation throughout opening times:

Opens Saturday 12 July 2-9pm
Continues Sunday 13 July 12-6pm
Friday 18, Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 July 12:6pm

Alt_R, Enclave 1-2, 50 Resolution Way, Deptford, London


The Bastard Fields
by Most Dismal Swamp
2025

The Bastard Fields is a degenerative fever-dream emerging from a slumgullion world of model-collapsed realities. It reflects our emerging neural mediascape and its adversarial hallucinations as a sublime 'hostile architecture'.

The cast of The Bastard Fields includes an embittered bog body discussing exit strategies with a homemade robot, two creative directors cooking up some dank reality-settings among a DIY Splinternet, a mystic rabbit vlogging on the nature of rabbit holes, an outlaw preacher tending his field conventicle, and poor little Brownie is martyred :(

This is the clamour and humiliation of content at the end of the world.


Bockstensmannens Kusin
By Rustan Söderling
HD Video, 10:52, 2025

An alternative history of Gothenburg through the discovery of a Bog Body (the titular Bocksten Man who was actually found outside Varberg).


On Location
By Rustan Söderling
HD video, 19:24, 2023

On Location centres on a mysterious piece of land known in the film only as The Site. The narrative unfolds as a staged performance-lecture—part history lesson, part elaborate ritual—delivered by a solemn member of The Society, a stuffy bureaucratic group obsessed with cataloguing every trace left behind, from the seasonal colour of the leaves to the varying dampness of discarded cigarette butts. With dry reverence, the speaker moves through various attempts to reconstruct and understand the history of The Site—but in reverse.

As the lecture moves backward through time, The Site is re-framed through a series of speculative historical “eras.” These aren’t factual reconstructions but carefully staged dioramas built from myth, hearsay, and cultural memory. The depiction of each era is presented with unwavering authority, despite its often surreal or contradictory details, exposing a deep desire to impose meaning on what is ultimately unknowable. Threading through these scenes is the mischievous, half-naked, figure of Pulcinella (known in the UK as mr Punch) whose clownish and often suicidal antics suggest a chaotic undercurrent beneath the superficially ordered history.

Gradually, the formal facade begins to slip. Props are reset mid-shot, sound cues misfire, and glitchy flickers of green screen reveal the production’s peripheries. These disruptions blur the line between illusion, documentation and performance, unraveling any stable sense of re-enactment or immersion.

Rather than searching for historical truth, On Location meditates on the impossibility of capturing it. History emerges not as a fixed time-line, but as an ever-shifting script—revised, re-staged, and retold by those with the power to do so. Through an inquiry into memory, myth, and institutional authority, the film asks: who decides what is remembered? What is lost in the process? And to what extent are our versions of the past just elaborate stage plays performed for ourselves?


This screening is part of the Deptford X Festival 2025 Fringe