Juliette Lewis is Lona Rey, crossing deserted futuristic landscapes under a haze of luna light, in the third installment of Daniel Arsham’s Future Relic series, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Lona wanders through an abandoned institution, encounters a horse, and poses questions to an owl during her longtime search to find her famous scientist father. After climate change had ravaged the planet, her father’s team had excavated the moon to save the earth — a briefly successful experiment that ultimately worsened the destruction of the environment. Lona is now determined to save his legacy. The nine-part Future Relic series also features James Franco and Matthew Maher.
"Future Relic started in 2011 when contemporary objects – guitars, radios, cameras – were remade in materials like volcanic ash and crystal, almost as if they had been found on some future archaeological site," explains the Brooklyn-based artist, who brings together art, architecture and performance, stage designing for Merce Cunningham and collaborating with Pharrell Williams and Hedi Slimane. “When I began showing these works I'd be asked about the world in which these objects existed. So I started writing a script and narrative around them.”
The film was shot in the monumental Bell Labs in New Jersey, designed by Eero Saarinen in the late fifties and left empty for the past 15 years. “For me getting into film was living these dreams that I had as a child. I was inspired by films in which the props and objects encapsulated an idea about the future,” explains the artist, who also used a John Lautner house in Los Angeles, designed around the same period, for some of the film’s scenes.
“The locations, how people dress, what technology looks like – they are not so removed from what things are like now; I tried to create a believable environment of the future.”
Launching with the premiere is the Future Relic 03 plaster cast bell clock, which, like many of the artist’s sculptures, has the dusty materiality of archaeological vessels.