Tarpaulins

“They eat the wood up. And they think a wood structured house is a fallen tree. They’re doing their job, they don’t know any better.” (John Ruddock, pest control operator.)
Lisa Truttmann follows the story of termite fumigation tents in Los Angeles on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit of the city’s tiniest inhabitants and their exterminators. The tents become temporary sculptures, beasts heaving in the wind, skeletons dressed and stripped by workers we see. Wooden structures, soon to be homes, become eroded landscapes after an attack. And there, underneath the colorful mantle and its function, Truttmann elicits revelations of the uncanny.
In a constant dialogue we hear the voices of workers, exterminators, entomologists, chemists, city planners, fellow travellers and literary authors. As an essay film, TARPAULINS is a subjective view on a place and a circuitous conversation, embracing “unkempt activity”, restless labor, meandering thoughts and obsessive wanderings.

In the presence of Lisa Truttmann.