Deborah Stratman's work escapes easy labels. Crossing several types of media — from moving images to photography, sculpture, drawing or installation — her work can be found both in the official selection of Rotterdam or Sundance festivals and in the halls of important galleries and museums, such as MoMA or the Pompidou Centre. Regardless of the chosen output, the work of this American filmmaker and artist is mainly concerned with the ability to question that which underlies mundane things, routines and behaviors. 

Her works grow out of a fascination with dolines, birds of prey, orthoptera (musical insects), comets, tectonic plates, acoustics, mineralogy and electromagnetism. By exploring the history, uses, mythologies and patterns present in different landscape types, her work points to the relationships between physical environments and the power and control struggles that humans engage over territory, questioning elemental historical narratives about faith, freedom, expansionism or the paranormal. 

More recently, Stratman has focused on narratives about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various other futures. The geo-biosphere is presented as a place of possible evolution, where humans disappear but life endures.

“I'd like to work with subject matter that resists me. To be harrowed by ideas, willing to risk for them, moved by them, is what sustains me, in the words of Deborah Stratman, who says she aspires, without relying on language, to achieve an intellectual cinema: “I want my work to question its own social function while remaining aesthetically seductive. I make films for the pleasure of creating a temporal universe.”

The choice to focus on Deborah Stratman fulfills one of the main purposes of Solar's programming work, which extends to Curtas: on the one hand, that of bridging the territories of Cinema and Visual Arts and, on the other, that of enhancing synergies between the two projects, revealing less known aspects of the work of artists/filmmakers of reference and greater importance on the international scene.

The parallel programme includes, from 8 to 16 July, during the 31st Curtas, the cycle InFocus, which presents a selection of her cinematographic work; a Carte Blanche, in which the artist presents films that have influenced her work; and the masterclass Radical Listening, in which she explores the potential of sound and audio as a motor and space creator.