SYNOPSIS
When the pandemic first closed the world down, I was secretly relieved. Thankful for the change in what had become my predictable, monotonous routine of daily life. Obviously I wasn’t alone, as evidenced by the ‘great resignation’. So, during the autumn of 2020, while I was teaching online, I answered a friend’s desperate plea to take care of her farm in rural Wisconsin. She was needed at her sick husband’s bedside at a hospital in Iowa. Escaping my small oppressive apartment in Humboldt Park, I spent the next months on that farm, together with four cats, Fernando the mule, and two ageless ponies - Pebbles and Wilma.
Not unlike Henry David Thoreau’s transcendental journey of social emancipation in Walden, my withdrawal from the city gave me a distant vantage point from which to view the effects of the Corona Virus as a social experiment. One which has already had profound influences on the future of human society.
This film was supported by a residency at the Roger Brown House & Studio in New Buffalo, MI, administered by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Textures of Solitude
[and other stories of life with Ponies]
A memoir of modern solitude on 16mm film, 10 minutes, 2024
by Danièle Wilmouth
CREDITS
Music
Color Correction & Post-production Assistance
Telephone Voices
Still Photos
Yunju You
Claudia Ardiles & Irina Bucan
Jerzy Rose
SPECIAL THANKS
Cynthia Ashby, Mark Jeffery, Jerzy Rose & Joseph Ravens
Photos by Jerzy Rose │ Webpage Design by Yunju You
Copyright 2024 Danièle Wilmouth. All Right Reserved