This year's retrospective on the theme WE ARE NOT ALONE
News – 14.05.2023
Since its beginnings in 1992, the IFFI has been dealing with socio-critical and political issues that are addressed in a variety of ways in film. Not only the themes of individual films, but also cinema itself, through the situation of collective viewing, offer the space to reflect on the political in film and to make the most diverse perspectives on controversial debates visible. Last year, the theme of the crisis in society-environment relations was already addressed. With EVERY STAR AND EVERY PLANET IS IN PLACE BUT YOU, PLANET EARTH. afrofuturistic counter-designs met questions of justice in crisis conditions. This year's retrospective, themed WE ARE NOT ALONE!, takes a look at the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and the social inequality that comes with it. The films not only highlight the ongoing crisis, but also ask what alternatives there are to an anthropocentric view of the world, explicitly emphasising the interconnectedness of human and non-human worlds. For humans are not alone in the world, they are not the centre of life - instead, the films presented plead for a focus on the interconnectedness of all living beings and on togetherness. The selected films, which date from 1966 to the present, approach the great challenges in very different ways: whether classic documentary or experimental cinema, each film provides food for thought on WE ARE NOT ALONE in its own way. Visitors are thus immersed in the world of microorganisms, discover neurobiological images, accompany a tomato on its journey through a capitalist world and go down into the depths of mines in mining areas.
WE ARE NOT ALONE.
Anna Ladinig and Michael Klingler
The term Anthropocene indicates that we are increasingly confronted with the consequences of the catastrophic assumption that nature can be dominated. In light of the scientific popularisation of humans as a ‘geological force’ (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), alternative concepts and narratives, such as the Econocene (Norgaard, 2013), the Capitalocene (Malm, 2016; Moore, 2016), the Technocene (Hornborg, 2015), the Plantationocene and the Chthulucene (Haraway, 2015), call for a much more critical reflection on, or overcoming of, the dichotomous relationship between nature and culture. A transformative, relational way of thinking that not only argues for relativisation of anthropocentric perspectives, but also heralds the end of the concept of 'nature' and emphasises the growing inseparability of naturalness and artificiality so as to bring the interplay of countless inter- and intra-actions by multiple species to the fore.
This fundamental critique of anthropocentrism, on the one hand, requires alternative, sometimes radical, ideas and concepts that resist the paralysing narrative of apocalypse and 'accelerationism' in planetary transformation (Danovski & Viveiros de Castro, 2019). Instead, it is essential to recognise the agency and rights of non-human actors (Demos, 2016) as well as the coexistence of species and forms of collectivity that create new ways of being and possibilities for the future. A shift in perspective occurs in animistic ontologies and indigenous cosmologies, grounded in multinaturalism and perspectivism (Krenak, 2020), as well as in technological-ecological hybridisations that reference Lynn Margulis’s revolutionary theory of evolution based on symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species.
On the other hand, there is also a need for alternative forms of narrative that allow for such complex scalar relationships to be communicated. The medium of film and the reception context of cinema hold great potential to aesthetically translate abstract and experimental reciprocal relationships in the form of ‘sym-poietic systems’ (Haraway, 2015) and to make them perceptible and tangible. In this context, the retrospective #32 WE ARE NOT ALONE. embraces an ecological critique to the project of modernity and offers alternatives, or glimmers of hope; a ‘terrestrial’ (Latour, 2018) reconsideration and recognition of coexistences, of human and non-human beings living together in symbiosis. In order to consciously challenge our dominant anthropocentric worldview, 17 films explore different perspectives that promote its decentring and emphasise the agency of a non-human world.
Dealing with the cinematic notion that WE form a web of complex, symbiotically generated and equal, interconnected communities, the film SYMBIOTIC EARTH (John Feldman, 2017) introduces the life and work of evolutionary theorist and biologist Lynn Margulis. Robert Bresson's AU HASARD, BALTHAZAR (1966) is considered to be one of the first cinematic attempts to relativise human subjectivity and reflect on the, often cruel, relationship with non-human beings based on the example of a donkey.
The experimental contributions in the first short film programme – OBITALTELI (Arztavazd Pelešjan, 1969), PULSE (Robin Petré, 2016), OLHE BEM AS MONTANHAS (Ana Vaz, 2018), and LE TIGRE DE TASMANIE (Vergine Keaton, 2018) – centre on different forms of coexistence and demonstrate that it’s mainly non-human beings who defend themselves against their extinction through re-appropriation and transformation. Ana Vaz's second contribution to the retrospective, É NOITE NA AMÉRICA (2022), uses the example of the young city of Brasília to show how different living beings seek refuge in one habitat and how challenging it is for all of them to preserve life. In BECOMING ANIMAL (2018), Emma Davie and Peter Mettler, together with philosopher David Abram, search for interaction and complicity in Grand Teton National Park in order to establish intuition, phenomenology, and critique of anthropocentrism as three essential pillars of thinking and life.
The second short film programme explores more-than-human and posthuman worlds in a series of experimental, audio-visually immersive contributions. These focus on the relationship between humans and tomatoes (ILHA DAS FLORES, Jorge Furtado, 1989), seismic waves, sound frequencies and plateaus (ALTIPLANO, Malena Szlam, 2018), as well as seeing plants (GESTURES TOWARD PLANTVISION, Sarah Abbott, 2021) and spiders (THE MULCH SPIDER'S DREAM, Karel Doing, 2018). Following the animistic capacity of film to see the movement of non-human beings, who seem inert and lifeless, SHUKU SHUKUWE (Agostinho Manduca Mateus Ika Muru Huni Kuin, 2012) introduces the cosmology and existential connection of the Huni Kuin people to plants as an example of contemporary indigenous filmmaking from the Amazon.
This is followed by a series of critical scientific-artistic contributions which address the socio-ecological vulnerabilities caused by the interaction of humans and non-humans. With a decolonial objective in mind, they also focus on the persistence and sovereignty of indigenous knowledge systems and their relevance for transformation. The GEOBODIES film projects by Swiss video artist Ursula Biemann explore various strands of knowledge about the intelligence of nature, the relationships between living beings and their conditions for coexistence: indigenous-technical translation processes of sound ecologies relating to Arctic marine life (ACOUSTIC OCEAN, 2018), metaphysics and DNA of tropical rainforest plants (FOREST MIND, 2018), and the constitutional recognition of nature and indigenous sovereignty (FOREST LAW, 2014). The latter is based on Michel Serres’ ‘The Natural Contract’ (1994) and was developed in cooperation with the Brazilian architect and scientist Paulo Tavares, who in NONHUMAN RIGHTS (2012) already explores the notion of philosophical ecology and the theory of radical universalism between humans and non-humans.
References:
Crutzen, P., Stoermer, E. 2000. The „Anthropocene“. Global Change Newsletter, International Geosphere–Biosphere Program Newsletter, 41: 17–18.
Danowski, D., Viveiros de Castro, E. 2019. In welcher Welt leben? Ein Versuch über die Angst vor dem Ende. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
Demos, T.J. 2016. Decolonizing Nature. Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Haraway, D. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6 (1): 159–165.
Hornborg, A. 2015. The Political Ecology of the Technocene: Uncovering ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system. In: Hamilton, C., Gemenne, F., Bonneuil, C. (Hrsg.). The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch: 57-69. Abingdon: Routledge.
Krenak, A. 2020. A vida não é útil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Latour, B. 2018. Das terrestrische Manifest. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Malm, A. 2016. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.
Margulis, L. 2017. Der symbiotische Planet oder Wie die Evolution wirklich verlief. Westend: Frankfurt/Main.
Moore, J. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.
Norgaard, R.B. 2013. The econocene and the California delta. San Francisco Estuary & Watershed Science, 11: 1–5.
Serres, M. 1994. Der Naturvertrag. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt.
