Ben Rivers: ‘Urthworks’ [Book launch & screening]


Join us for a special screening and conversation to celebrate the launch of Urthworks by Ben Rivers. Adapted from Rivers’s Urthworks film trilogy, this new book takes the form of a visual novel set on a future planet, imagined across three distinct stages following environmental collapse. Interwoven with texts by acclaimed science fiction writer Mark von Schlegell, Urthworks merges speculative storytelling with visual experimentation.

Working in 16mm film and digital imagining technology, Rivers captures extraordinary real locations in Japan, Tuvalu, Lanzarote, Arizona, and Somerset as well as fabricated environments. While epic in scope, the narrative that unfolds is shaped around tactile and human detail, offering an intimate, sensory account of ecological upheaval and human adaptation.

The evening will include a full screening of the Urthworks trilogy, followed by an in-depth conversation between Ben Rivers and Mark von Schlegell.

Tickets available here 
Tuesday 27 May
18:30  

ICA 
The Mall 
London SW1Y 5AH

Programme:

Slow Action (2010, 45 mins)
A post-apocalyptic sci-fi work that blends documentary, ethnography, and fiction. Set on Earth in the distant future, where new islands and archipelagos have been formed after catastrophic sea-level rise, it re-imagines the remnants of civilization.

Urth (2016, 19 mins)
A reflection on isolation, sustainability, and human ambition, inspired by the experimental ecological project Biosphere 2.

Look Then Below (2019, 23 mins)
Shot in the eerie depths of Wookey Hole Caves, this film conjures a subterranean future populated by otherworldly beings and thick with mythic atmosphere.

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