Buckle up for a journey to the far side of Australia, to observe a total eclipse of the sun, accompanied by the ghost of Neil Armstrong. Signatures of Earth places humankind’s heavenly gaze in juxtaposition with patchy, quotidian, Earth-bound situations. Encounters are partial, unfulfilled stubs of stories, creating an alternative vision of the planetary. This documentary film challenges those conditioned to consume neo-liberal consensus filmmaking in the time of the Anthropocene!
Signatures of Earth holds a mirror to totalising narrative hierarchies that have arisen on the planetary. Emboldened by a poetic humanist sensibility, the gaze consumes... it all makes sense, but only as long as you don’t want it to.
Join us for the premiere screening of Signatures of Earth along with a panel discussion between Dr Robert Nugent and Dr Polly Stanton, co-director of the Re-Vision: Ethical Futures Moving Image Network at RMIT.
This screening is presented by RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute and Environmental Films Australia, and co-presented by RMIT Re-Vision: Ethical Futures Moving Image Network in collaboration with Composite Moving Image.
Robert Nugent is a multi-award-winning, non-fiction filmmaker based in Canberra, Australia. His films have screened internationally (IDFA, Cinéma du Réel, et al) and include: End of the Rainbow (2008), which told of an eternal gold mine, wandering from one place to another on planet earth. Memoirs of a Plague (2011) tackled the locust story, heretically proposing that these biblically imagined insects don’t cause famine! Night Parrot Stories (2016) – currently on SBS on demand, premiered in Alice Springs and sought to reconcile western perspectives on a rare bird. Nugent holds a PhD (2025) from the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney.
See www.viafilm.org for a full CV and filmography.
All proceeds from the ticket sales will be donated to Together for Treaty.
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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