For our July Video of the Month, Vtape has selected an earthy midsummer entry by the wonderful animator and visual artist Jesi Jordan. Concrete Shape is a site-specific film created and performed by Jesi Jordan at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. The special effects are hand-made using biodegradable materials such as Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, cactus husks, chicken eggs, and water.

Jordan’s hallucinatory transformations of the self function as assertions of the body as land. Her hand-drawn animation style finds a natural counterpart in the volcanic woodlands, where morphing figures reappear here, earthen: hydrophilic or ossified. Each clay body’s resting place a kind of altar, water is the animating force that pours from one orifice to another, one vessel to another, sustaining all life forms.

Concrete Shape
Jesi Jordan (Canada/Mexico, 2023, 5:02)

Jesi Jordan is a self-taught animator and performer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her work is full of chimeric landforms, melting bodies, radical womanhood, sentient objects, and disarming ruptures of time and space. Inspired by her nomadic lifestyle, Jesi’s animated short films, music videos and performances are a fever-dream travelogue. Her animations are diaries of her most traversed landscape: that of her own vivid imagination.