Stemple Pass

"Stemple Pass Road is gravel and runs south out of Lincoln, Montana. Five miles down, on the left, was Ted Kaczynski’s mailbox, and about a hundred yards in, his cabin that he began building in June 1971. That same year he began a journal. When he was arrested on 3 April 1996, suspected of being the unabomber, the journal was found in the cabin, along with 257 books, hand written and typed copies of his manifesto, some concealed notes, and a few coded notebooks filled with numbers. In June 2011 the FBI auctioned off Kaczynski’s belongings, and through circumstance, the journal, concealed notes, and coded notebooks came into my possession. I read all that I could, and then wrote a computer programme to decode the notebooks. These are the texts used (without permission) in Stemple Pass. Five years earlier I built a replica of the Walden Pond cabin Henry David Thoreau built in 1845. Then in the spring of 2008 I built a copy of another cabin, Kaczynski’s. This was the beginning of the Two Cabins Project."
(James Benning)

"An isolated cabin set amongst a group of small trees, a forest rising up behind it that grows progressively thicker to cover the mountain peak beyond. Four static shots, each from the same angle and each half an hour in length: spring, fall, winter and finally summer. Birdsong, flies, mist over the peak, rain, snow, a sunset. A voice that periodically intrudes on these tranquil scenes, reading out passages from the writings of infamous anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski, the cabin being a replica of his own one. Accounts of living on hunted meat, small acts of vandalism, homemade bombs, fingers being blown off, remorse or lack of it, the beauty of nature, environmental destruction, the repressive current order.
The relationship between text and image winds its way between association, correlation and contrast; fascination gives way to disgust, indignation to identification. Yet by the close, text and image have re-converged to ravishing effect. As the sun’s rays weaken and the trees gradually turn red and then black, the senses have been sharpened in just the way Kaczynski describes: a heightened, almost blissful feel for nature that emerges from pure duration."
(Berlinale)