Branching Out

We don’t know what will surprise you more — the dancing, flickering images bouncing off the oak trees at Legion Park or the fact that there are actually people in a Miami-Dade park. This Saturday from 8 to 10 p.m., experimental film lovers and curious passersby will swarm the park for Dinorah de Jesús Rodríguez’s Elusive Landscape, a site-specific film installation where seven 16mm film loops will be projected onto foliage to a soundscape of ambient noise. But does Miami have an appetite for abstract cinema? Rodríguez, a video artist who has studied under Trinh T. Minh-ha, believes Miami’s “audience that will purposely seek out experimental film is very limited. But the audience that can be surprised by it in the street is everywhere.”

Elusive Landscape will run in five Miami-Dade parks. It recently took over the Tequesta mounds and dark trails of Arch Creek Park. And after turning Legion Park into a theater of trees, Rodríguez will take her projectors to E.G. Sewell Park, where, according to the artist, the beauty of royal palms and poinciana trees meets the grotesqueness of discarded Santería offerings.
Sat., July 17, 8 p.m., 2010