Snow is precarious, unstable, elusive. Its aesthetic and symbolic register often refer to notions of the romantic. Snow reduces the colour palette drastically, often turning environments into near black and white. As a material that surrounds other materials it has its own sonic spectrum: fresh snow muffling sounds, cold snow and wet snow creating distinctly different tones. Village (Veil) is a single shot video filmed during a two-week period of intense continuous snowfall in January 2019. Akin to a Breughel painting small figures occasionally populate the expansive white landscape. Over the course of the video’s duration the village gradually disappears behind a veil of snow while the continuous sound of a snow clearing machine reminds us that this is not simply a sublime view but also a site of laborious displacement of snow. This moment of ‘too much snow’ accentuated a tension between entropy and our desire – or need – for control. To keep chaos at bay.
