Atmospheres of Relief

Alexa Burrell (2025)

Runtime (14:55 mins)

ATMOSPHERES OF RELIEF is an Afrosurrealist psychogeography that explores regeneration—what happens when we release suffering and restore balance within ourselves. Inspired by the Yoruba myth of Oshun, the river goddess who transforms into a vulture to bring rain to a barren earth, I reimagine memento mori not as a somber reflection on death, but as a threshold—between a world in decline and the one that can take its place, between control and surrender, between stagnation and renewal.

Partially filmed at Villa Montalvo, the former estate of James Duval Phelan, the film speaks to the politics of land and power. As mayor of San Francisco, Phelan played a pivotal role in securing the Hetch Hetchy Valley as the city’s water source, applying for reservoir rights in 1901 and laying the groundwork for the Raker Act of 1913, which authorized the construction of the dam. Though the project continues to provide water to San Francisco, it came at the cost of an ecologically rich valley—an imposed wound, a forced redirection, a stagnation of life-giving water. This mirrors the infrastructures of control—like patriarchy—that confine both the natural world and the emotional landscape of Black men and boys, turning fluidity into rigidity, transformation into obstruction.

Through myth, landscape, and history, this film unearths what has been dammed up: the historical and contemporary pressures around Black masculinity, the necrotic grasp of patriarchy attempting to preserve its own decay, and the innocence that emerges when we are finally able to release painful systems. Just as rain follows drought and vultures cleanse decay to continue the cycle of life, this is a process not of dying, but of undying—a breaking through.

This environment is my offering, a forecast for what's to come when we let go of what no longer serves us and make space for relief.