MKA House
Elgin, Arizona
Like Planting on the Moon
Documenting landscape, architecture, and a wine that tastes like nowhere else on earth; MKA presents a short film and editorial photo series for Los Milics Vineyards.
Documenting landscape, architecture, and a wine that tastes like nowhere else on earth; MKA presents a short film and editorial photo series for Los Milics Vineyards.
What started as a visit to admire Chen + Suchart’s architectural work turned into an admiration for the story and the craftsmanship behind Los Milics.
MKA proposes an artifact, to close the distance between what Los Milics is and how it is seen. We want to capture this architectural space, the history of this landscape, and the wines, holding all three to a sacred standard.
Editorial images, and cinematography carried by a poetic, soft-spoken voiceover.
Arizona wine is at an inflection point, and Food & Wine has just signalled it. The narrative of the American Southwest as serious wine country is being written right now, and whoever holds the most compelling visual document of this region in this moment owns that story for a generation.
Los Milics, with its architecture, terroir, winemaker’s biography, and position at the base of the Biscuit, is the most visually and editorially defensible subject in the entire Arizona wine landscape.
We are intrigued by Pavle Milić, and how he found the soil at Elgin to defy every conventional wine-country instinct. Sandy loam, limestone, caliche. He calls growing here “like planting on the moon.” The phrase is not hyperbole. It is geology. An ancient sea floor left behind rocky, high-pH ground that forces the grape to struggle, and that struggle translates directly into complexity.
Vertical fins of weathered corten steel, rusting slowly toward the exact amber of the surrounding earth, alternate with mirror glass panels that dissolve the building’s edges by reflecting the sky, the mountains, the vines back at you. From a distance it reads like a land art installation. Up close, the rhythm of steel and light is almost musical.
Inside, raw concrete walls catch raking golden hour light. The open patio facade frames the Biscuit formation, Mt. Bruce, like a painting that was always there.
This is architecture designed to receive the desert.
The tone is new wave cinema: the stillness and austerity of early Terrence Malick, the flat desolation of Paris, Texas, the quiet formalism of Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Color is warm but deeply desaturated: raw sienna, bleached bone, dark rust.
A model moves through the space not as a lifestyle subject but in the way a figure exists in a landscape painting. She does not address the camera. She stands inside the steel fins, back to us, facing the mountains. She sits at the empty patio table at blue hour, a glass of wine untouched beside her. She walks a vine row at distance, nearly lost in the frame. She is not consuming the experience. She is part of the sediment.
The desert itself. Wind through the steel fins. Wind through the vines. The Sonoita plain is one of the windiest stretches of southern Arizona. That sound is the score. Sparse and low underneath it, perhaps a single cello note held long, but mostly the earth breathing.
Still. Movement only when necessary. The frame holds long enough that the viewer stops waiting for something to happen and starts looking at what is already there.
EquipmentMavic 2 Pro | Canon 1DX ii | Insta 360 X5
The film and the images live on the website and across social. They are built, from the first frame, to be pitched to editorial.
Figure as geology. Land art. Bleached bone and dark rust.
