Profit Motive and the Endless Sea
Bruno Atkinson's new short film about the desalination plant in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, is streaming on our website until the first of July!
Dear Friends,
We’re very honoured to announce that we’ve got a new, most fantastic film streaming up on our website until summer – Bruno Atkinson’s Profit Motive and the Endless Sea (2023).
Against a backdrop of almost-still footage, two parallel stories are told: that of the construction of the first desalination plant in Lanzarote solving the problem of water, and that of Shakespeare’s The Tempest through excerpts of Prospero’s solemn monologues. The film is a beautiful, solemn and very powerful meditation about hope beyond capitalism. We also spoke with Bruno about the film. You can read the conversation in full on culturala.org/profit-motive-and-the-endless-sea, where you can also stream the film :)
Maria / culturala
Profit Motive and the Endless Sea tells the founding story of capitalist control over the Canary Islands. How did you first encounter this history? And what made you make movies on the islands?
Bruno
I first came up with the idea after Emily Reed, a close friend and feminist researcher, was telling me of the hydro-feminist potential of The Tempest. I then moved to Lanzarote for work, where I was inspired by a group of artists who live and work with the history and culture of water on the island. But the main propeller behind making the film was when I discovered the documents, speeches and books that the engineers of the desalination plants have written since its installation in 1965. The way they spoke struck me as so similar to Shakespeare’s patriarch, there were so many parallels. So I chose to make a film that would use Shakespeare’s text, with its heavily subversive potential, to sort of denounce or pick holes in the narrative that the desalinators had created.
culturala
You speak about the narrative of capitalist expansion that incorporates the past only to justify its own presence in the future. All of that is currently on its head with the current climate crisis. What are your thoughts on the capitalist narrative of expansion? And what would you like people to do in response to seeing your film – do you have any particular ideas in regards to this?
Bruno
I’m not claiming that the material reality in Lanzarote is the worst situation in the world. If we are talking about the negative impacts of corporate expansion, there are examples which are far more pressing, where land is being devastated and communities destroyed on unimaginable scales. I’m focusing more on the effect that fiction can have on reality. People with a motive (be it profit or otherwise) often distort the past in order to justify their actions into the future. For the desalinators, the fiction was: ‘There was nothing here before us; after us everything grew.’ Because of this narrative, a whole culture of collecting, storing and caring for water has been almost completely eradicated by what is ultimately a dream of infinite resources. Endless water, so endless growth, so endless profit. And I think this is pretty dangerous, because no resource is endless, and the availability of drinking water is one of the biggest problems we are currently facing on this earth. So I guess I’d like people to think more about who is telling the story of progress. And I’d love it if it made people think more about water, even if it’s just wondering how it gets to their tap.
culturala
What do you think changed by the creation of the desalination plant? The film speaks of traditions being lost, but you also write about some people on the island still working with the traditional ways of collecting water against what you call ‘the regime of desalination.’ Could you expand more on that?
Bruno
I think this is an interesting and quite difficult question. On the one hand, you could see the arrival of the Spanish desalination industry onto Lanzarote as a godsend for the islanders; opening up the island to the outside world, expanding the population and increasing the standard of living on the island. On the other, you could see it as having some pretty serious consequences, as the origin of an industry massively reliant on fossil fuels, plastic, water (imported in bottles) and vast swathes of illegal hotels and settlements built on protected land, while thousands of ancient structures are abandoned to the march of time.
However, as you mention there are still people who are working with and preserving the old culture of water on the island. I would point to the many islanders who still have working cisterns and who are partially or wholly reliant on rainfall for their intake of water, Nona Perera, who alongside the Canarian Government’s General Directorate of Cultural Heritage is restoring cisterns of particular scientific and historical value, Patrick Simone and Simone Rüssli, who work closely with structures of water in their artistic practice on the island, and the countless historians, scientists, sociologists and environmental activists who are working to keep the history of water in Lanzarote relevant and alive.
With love,
Bruno and culturala