A List of Lost Poems

Dane Mitchell was Aotearoa New Zealand’s artist at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, where he premiered Post Hoc, and installation employing mass technology to disperse a corpus of nothingness. Invisible waves of sound carrying a litany of losses were transmitted across location in Venice by the mysterious symbol of the this project – cell towers badly disguised as pine trees.

This film documents the year-long production of Dane’s exhibition – a journey which takes us from his studio in Tāmaki Makaurau to a stealth cell tower factory in Guangzhou, China, to the installation and premiere of Post hoc in Venice, Italy. The film also extends beyond documentation into an essayistic visual poem that explores ideas central to the work; ideas of disappearance, of abundance and over-production, the technification of nature, the limits of epistemological thinking, and the trace of loss that can be mapped over every surface of our built environments.

DoP/Director – Adam Luxton
Executive Producer – Adrian Burr
Producers – Adam Luxton, Lucy McMillan
Sound Post and VO recordings – Max Scott
Music – Minit