The Flood

This new single-channel moving image work addresses experiences of ecological disquiet, and considers how image-saturated culture still struggles to capture intangible registers of scale.

Drawing on original and archival photographic records of a historical incident that occurred in northern Germany in the 1960s, The Flood collides this material with a series of seemingly disparate contemporary settings.

Superimposing different sensory and cognitive registers over the historical record, Ruth Höflich’s work builds on the history of montage techniques in experimental filmmaking, where cadence, atmosphere, and form challenge the archival material, interrogating the act of image-making itself.