Yield reflects on cycles and on the legibility of the so-called natural world. Taking the form of a video poem, it portrays twilight — the time of day when the sky is still shaped by the sun’s rays, even though the sun itself is no longer visible.
Twilight bathes us in a light of indeterminate origin, raising the question: is this blue dawn or blue dusk? When familiar markers fall away, how do we make sense of where we are?
The film’s shades of blue immerse the viewer in the subtle intelligence of gradients and spectrums. Twilight draws the witness beyond the binaries of day and night, light and darkness, offering a form of wisdom drawn from the situated, everyday cycles we inhabit.
This film was co-directed by Tracy Valcárcel, Michaela Gerussi and Erin Hill. Over five consecutive days, we filmed the sky during the twilight of dawn and dusk from the same location. This process created precise and sensitive windows of time for filming, as we worked around the light of the sky we wanted to capture. Drawing directly from our previous works which were similarly interested in cycles and a bodily-based sense of time (Valcárcel and Gerussi’s film the moon rises in four parts and Hill’s Deep Gazing and Sunrise Commitment), we use images, sound and text to portray “nature” from within an urban environment. Our work takes a post-naturalist stance that proposes a redefinition of cycles involving entanglements between nature, culture and urban zones.
YIELD’s soundscape was created by sound designer and composer Charlie Khalil Prince, with additional music by Erin Hill. The poetry was written collaboratively on site by the artists and includes quotations from Clarice Lispector, Anne Boyer, and Maxine Segalowitz.
YIELD was screened in 2025 at London’s cafe OTO and in 2026 as part of the Avant-Garde program of the 44th edition of The International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal, curated by eunice bélidor.
