Screenings: July 2020 - 'Distant Nature', Knoll Galerie Wien, Fotograf Gallery Prague and MAO / DIG in K13 - Kasarne Kulturpark Košice. Simultaneous screenings Dec 2019 - Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach International Mini Movie and Film Festivals, Florida US Nov 2019 - The Hague Global Cinema Festival NL April 2019 - AltFF Spring - Alternative Film Festival Toronto CANADA - Winner Super Short Film Best Cinematography Finalist in The 65th Blake Prize, Casulla Power House NSW Oct 2018 - '40 North Dance Film Festival' Official Selection, San Diego US May 2018 - 'Odile', Dandenong Regional Gallery, Melbourne AUSTRALIA May 2017 - '23:22 NW 223°', Gallery SÍM, Reykjavík, ICELAND ---------------------------------------- '23° West' was shot in the Western region of Iceland during my artist residency at SIM. Three artists from different counties come together to create this collaborative film project. Dancer Icelandic, choreographer Finnish and video Australian. Dancer: Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir Choreographer: Favela Vera Ortiz Video artist: Vanessa White Thank you: Frank van de Ven, Gabrielle Mimram, Janet Tavener, Rew Hank, Katrin Helena Jonsdottir, SIM Residency. Artist statement: Created by Australian interdisciplinary artist Vanessa White, Finnish choreographer Favela Vera Ortiz and Icelandic performer Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir. Shot on location in the West region of Iceland around the Snaefellsjokull glacier and National Park. 23 West brings together Australian interdisciplinary artist Vanessa White, Finnish choreographer Favela Vera Ortiz and Icelandic performer Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir. The work was filmed in the West region of Iceland around Snæfellsjökull (the glacier) and National Park. In a landscape rendered treeless by generations of human land use and millennia of successive glaciations White, Vera Ortiz and Bergsteinsdottir create a work that uses location, movement, and an expanded video mise en scene to enact an inner landscape. They perform visually and bodily the process of navigating the terrain of emotion, thought and ideas creating for the viewer a rich imaginary space where it is possible to inhabit the work as a psychic theatre to reflect on a personal relationship to navigating the passing of time. Bergsteinsdottir and Vera Ortiz devise a Butoh influenced language of movement which with the continuous repetition of falling, standing, grappling with the landscape and contemplation evokes a Beckett like stoicism. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. White expands the timeframe of the movement and the editing so that actions occur simultaneously outside linear time. Viewers experience both the movements of Bergsteinsdottir and the landscape itself as a floating continuum of associations allowing the work to form a more abstract totality. One where both the metaphor and the physical actualities of movement and landscape combine to create the work. Bio’s Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir is an Icelandic performer and artist based in Akureyri, Iceland. Her works involve the physical embodiment of interior images and explore body, movement, and nature through her works. The underlying themes in her work are movement and a state of being, investigating physical presence and relationships to the natural environment. Growing up in the north of Iceland, nature and the elements have been a strong influence on her work. Thora graduated from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2004. She has performed and exhibited throughout Europe and China and has work represented in the Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland collection. Favela Vera Ortiz is a Finnish-Argentinian choreographer based in Helsinki, Finland. She creates compositions that extend the boundaries of the body, self, and space. Favela is well known as an inventor of Choreographer’s Appointment, in which participants find their solo movements with the choreographer, and engage in a social form of personal choreography with a performance. Favela has worked with multiple themes in her native Finland, in Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Melbourne, Australia, to name a few locations. She studied at the University of Dance, choreographer department in Stockholm, Sweden. Choreographed works for dance companies in Buenos Aires and in Gothenburg and! has worked at several artist residencies including The Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, France. Vanessa White is an Australian visual and interdisciplinary artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work traverses multiple disciplines predominantly working with, painting, animation, and performance. Vanessa navigates pathways through visceral artworks exploring longstanding traditions of aesthetic and philosophical debate about art and identity. E: vanessawhitemedia@gmail.com W: vanessawhite.me vanessawhitemedia.com favelaveraortiz.tumblr.com solla.org

Screenings: July 2020 - 'Distant Nature' Knoll Galerie Wien AUSTRIA, Fotograf Gallery Prague CZECH REPUBLIC, MAO / DIG in K13 - Kasarne Kulturpark Košice SLOVAKIA June 2020 - Honourable mention, Experimental Forum Film Festival, Los Angeles US 2020 Acquired for permanent collection Latrobe Regional Gallery March 2020 - Adelaide Arts Festival Centre, SA Jan-Feb 2020 - 'Moving Pictures', LaTrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell VIC Sept 2019 - Arts Mildura, 'Salt Body' exhibition, VIC July 2019 - 'The Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival', Winton QLD Performer: Peter Fraser Video: Vanessa White Music: Michael Havir and Ania Reynolds Filmed at Lake Tyrrell, Sea Lake, VIC Australia ‘Salt Lake’ is a poetic video that visualises and explores our need to engage with and connect to the natural world. As both a part of nature and a witness to nature, our impact is fraught with responsibility for the challenges and dangers of climate change. ‘Salt Lake’ is a mesmerising and haunting cinematic journey into a sublime pearlescent void, following a figure through a seemingly endless, dream-like landscape. Within this lake site, the interplay between performer and camera is choreographed precisely, merging an inner mind-scape with an outer landscape to generate liminal insights, evocatively connecting human perception with the natural environment. Filmed at Lake Tyrrell in the Mallee district of Victoria, the lake is formed by a shallow, salt-crusted depression. Here land and sky appear to merge as the shallow, lake-water reflects an image of the sky. The lake takes its name from the Wergaia word for ‘sky.’ ===================================== Last year Peter and I spent two weeks filming at Lake Tyrrell and Pink Lakes Murray Sunset National Park. This video is the first in a series of work that we created there. This video draws on the ethereal and intuitive performance traditions of Butoh and Improvisation, in concert with the images of landscape and the environment, to see how the strangeness and the reformulation of the body in motion can be made to perform and narrate meaning.

Screening: Jan 2018, '23° WEST', Sawtooth ARI, Launceston, TASMANIA 23 West brings together Australian interdisciplinary artist Vanessa White, Finnish choreographer Favela Vera Ortiz and Icelandic performer Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir. The work was filmed in the West region of Iceland around Snæfellsjökull (the glacier) and National Park. In a landscape rendered treeless by generations of human land use and millennia of successive glaciations White, Vera Ortiz and Bergsteinsdottir create a work that uses location, movement, and an expanded video mise en scene to enact an inner landscape. They perform visually and bodily the process of navigating the terrain of emotion, thought and ideas creating for the viewer a rich imaginary space where it is possible to inhabit the work as a psychic theatre to reflect on a personal relationship to navigating the passing of time. Bergsteinsdottir and Vera Ortiz devise a Butoh influenced language of movement which with the continuous repetition of falling, standing, grappling with the landscape and contemplation evokes a Beckett like stoicism. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. White expands the timeframe of the movement and the editing so that actions occur simultaneously outside linear time. Viewers experience both the movements of Bergsteinsdottir and the landscape itself as a floating continuum of associations allowing the work to form a more abstract totality. One where both the metaphor and the physical actualities of movement and landscape combine to create the work. Dancer: Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir Choreographer: Favela Vera Ortiz Videographer/editor: Vanessa White Music and sound: Michael Havir and Ania Reynolds. Mixed by Michael Havir

Crossing Latitudes ESPOO CITY THEATER, FINLAND Nov 2018 Dance performance Choreography: Favela Vera Ortiz Dancer: Tanja Illusion Sound: Sergio Castrillón Scenography: Lotta Esko Video: Vanessa White Dancer Video: Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir A performance combining projected images with the movement of a dancer on stage. Images modify the human interface, creating a dialogue in which the body becomes an ever-changing scenery. Crossing Latitudes is a part of the Globe Art Point Performance Series at Espoo City Theatre: https://espoonteatteri.fi

With video, I can experiment across different fields, incorporating interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional ways of thinking and working. Various forms of creative expression, including drawing, writing, photography, choreography and performance are integrated to provide conceptual fluidity and material flexibility as a platform for site-specific or public installation, performance, and presentation. The final form and narrative structure of my productions work in concert with imagery of the landscape and environment to explore the uncanny effects and strangeness produced through the reformulation of bodies in motion which in turn perform and narrate new, visceral possibilities of meaning. One of the critical elements of the work is the interpretation and visualisation of both corporeal and non-verbal experience; how to find new ways to document and communicate the unspoken and ineffable that is equally engaging and compelling and meaningful as the actual, powerful experience/s of the body. Our examination/s of gesture and form of the body in space suffused with sound/music will provide substantive additions to the lexicon of possible meaning for audiences witnessing these projects. Video Art Compilation, 04:29 min 00:00 23° WEST, single channel video, 2017 Performer: Thora Solvieg Bergsteinsdottir Choreographer: Favela Vera Ortiz Music: Mobigratis Video Artist: Vanessa White 00:50 23° WEST, three channel video, 2018 Performer: Thora Solvieg Bergsteinsdottir Choreographer: Favela Vera Ortiz Music: Michael Havir Video Artist: Vanessa White 01:15 Salt Lake, single channel video, 2018 Performer: Peter Fraser Music: Michael Havir and Ania Reynolds Video Artist: Vanessa White 02:06 Salt Lake, three channel video, 2019 Performer: Peter Fraser Music: Michael Havir and Ania Reynolds Video Artist: Vanessa White 02:29 Crossing Latitudes, multidisciplinary performance, 2018 Location: Espoo City Theatre, Espoo FINLAND Performers: Tanja Illuka, Sergio Music: Sergio Andrés Castrillón Video performer: Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir Video Artist: Vanessa White 02:56 Body Latitude, single channel video, 2019 Performer: Tanja Illuka Choreographer: Favela Vera Ortiz Music: Sergio Andrés Castrillón Video Artist: Vanessa White 03:29 Body Latitude, single channel video, installation view, 2019 Location: North City 4, Melbourne AUSTRALIA Performer: Tanja Illuka Choreographer: Favela Vera Ortiz Video Artist: Vanessa White 03:46 Saint Sixte Chapel, single channel video, 2019 Performer: Emmanuelle Echeverria Music: Michael Havir and Ania Reynolds Video Artist: Vanessa White

Filmed at Hesperia Park, Helsinki, Finland. Performer: Thora Solveig Bergsteinsdottir Choreographer: Favela Vera Ortiz Video artist: Vanessa White Music: Sergio Castrillón 2018 ------------ Screening: Nov 2018, NG Creative Art Residency Winter Season exhibition, Eygalières FRANCE