Geological drama(s) by Juan Palacios

GEOLOGICAL

On

living

DRAMA(S)

ruins

and

earthly

entanglements

C

R

E

D

Text by Juan Palacios Design and layout by Carlos Ndungmandum Printed in repros

I

T

S

FOREWORD:

A

WILD

WILD

GARDEN

It’s early spring and the warning sirens wake me up at noon. I arrived in Amsterdam last night, after a long flight on an empty airplane and the crossing of a few ghost airports. Jet lagged, I shuffle out to the backyard. The siren gets closer and closer, louder and louder, and sweeps across my ears like a wave, from east to west. The sun is blinding. Oblivious to the sound, the elderberry, some bluebells, and other wildflowers are timidly starting to bloom. I notice wild strawberries sprouting among the tiles of the patio floor as well as several ant colonies digging holes and extracting the sand of the bottom of the sea that this place once used to be, all impassive despite the hysteria outside.

One of the tricks you can employ in a panic attack is to look around for 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste… and next thing you know, you’re grounded. Noticing where you are and who and what you are with makes you realize that whatever’s happening isn’t the end of the world. Similarly, in reaction to the climatic uncertainty and uprooting effects of globalization, Bruno Latour tells us that “to resist this loss of a common orientation, we shall have to come down to earth; we shall have to land somewhere. So, we shall have to learn how to get our bearings, how to orient ourselves. And to do this we need something like a map of the positions imposed by the new landscape…” The ongoing modernization project and the idea of progress always connected to production is a force that drives us forwards. However, COVID-19 put that march on hold for a while, and “without that driving beat we may notice other temporal patterns.”1 In the midst of this uncanny global event, I have the privilege of landing in my wild wild garden. It’s a garden because it’s a planned, human-made space for the enjoyment of plants and “nature.” It’s wild because no one takes care of it; non-human beings are taking over.

But “care” is a broad concept and the fact is that I do care a lot about it. As I see it, doing nothing is also caring because it allows all kinds of unpredictable possibilities to come to fruition in a much richer, more biodiverse way than cultivating only certain species to the detriment of the unwanted “weeds” and “creepy crawlers.” The place “where wild things are” represents the anti-hegemonic, where disorder and disobe-

dience interrupt neat narratives, and where new kinds of structures can arise.2 Why not think of cinema as a wild garden where often-neglected narratives can unfold? Cinema as possibility.

Even though this pandemic is feeding into the already-pervasive apocalyptic tone of our time, it feels less like the end of the world or the beginning of a new one than it does a simulacrum. Like those sirens that woke me up. Just a test of the alarm system designed to alert people in the Netherlands to a possible break in the dykes that allow us to live safely on this reclaimed, temporarily dry land. But one thing this virus did is to remove the near future, from the equation—or my near future, at least. With all travel plans canceled and barely anything on the agenda for the next few months, nowness has been extended. And this thicker present allows us to pay attention to normally unnoticed things.

Small things. Like the moss growing on the little mounds of moist soil piled up on random cracks in the concrete. It’s in this expanded present tense that I write this text.

* Please put your headphones on, scan the QR code below and play the track.

What you are hearing is a recording of crickets. There are two tracks. One is being played at a regular speed and the other is a slowed down version. Crickets have a faster lifespan than humans do. Their sound is slowed down to the equivalent of the human lifespan. What you are hearing are the crickets only. No instruments or voices are added. Close your eyes and listen for a couple of minutes. Then adjust the volume as preferred and keep reading the research publication while the soundtrack plays in the background.

THE

DETONATING

IMAGE

July 16, 1945, Jornada del Muerto Desert, New Mexico, USA, 05:29:21 MWT. One millisecond after the explosion of “The Gadget,” the first atomic device ever detonated, a photograph in black and white is taken. What looks like a seed or a vulva that just germinated will root deeper than anyone imagined. This could be the first image ever registered in and of the Anthropocene, the so-called human epoch.

This very first nuclear explosion is “just a test.” It is called the “Trinity Test” and it is part of the larger Manhattan Project, a research and development undertaking during World War II that produces the first nuclear weapons. A twin device will be dropped on Nagasaki a couple of weeks later.

At the time of detonation, the surrounding mountains are illuminated “brighter than daytime” for a second or two. A witness writes in his diary, “The lighting effects beggar description. The whole country is lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It’s golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lights every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined”.3 A thought blooms in the head of J. Robert Oppenheimer, wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the father of the atomic bomb: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” This sublime feeling of awe and terror doesn’t seem to rely on the majestic work of nature anymore, but rather on the destructive potential of human creations.

The device explodes with an energy equivalent to around 22 kilotons of TNT. Seismometers around the world register the event as a small earthquake. The desert sand of the Tularosa Basin, largely made of silica, melts and becomes a mildly radioactive light green glass, which will be later named trinitite. This is the core idea of the Anthropocene made material: humans have become a geological force.

The Anthropocene is the human epoch. It defines Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric, and other Earth system processes are now altered by humans. Even in the deepest nooks and crannies of nature, there is a human choir singing.

The mushroom cloud—since the cloud is also phallic both in shape and origin, if any mushroom in particular it should be amanita phalloides, also known as the death cap—created by the bomb reaches 12.1 kilometers in height, and even though the device explodes in the air, it makes a considerable crater on the ground. However, the main trace it leaves behind is invisible to the human eye. As the particles formed during the explosion are highly radioactive, the “ruins” of this event, and overall nuclear era, will persist for thousands of years.

Over 70 years later, the 34 members of the Working Group of

the Anthropocene, part of The International Commission on Stratigraphy, look for evidence that indicates whether we are or not in a new geological time unit. Apart from a few deniers, the vast majority of the human population of this planet would acknowledge that we are in a global ecological crisis: climate change, species extinction, ocean acidification, air pollution, soil degradation—the list goes on. There is plenty of evidence that tells us that all Earth systems are altered by human activities. However, identifying a new geological epoch requires a higher standard of proof?

In conversations with the Basque geologist Dr. Alejandro Cearreta, one of the members of the Working Group of the Anthropocene, he explains to me how in order for a new geological epoch to start there has to be a synchronic global event that can be read on the geological strata. Like the meteorite that fell on YucatĂĄn and erased the dinosaurs from the face of the Earth, for instance. The powerful impact that event had on Earth put an end to the Jurassic period and ushered in a new period called the Cretaceous. The cloud of dust that this meteorite produced took years to settle. When it did it blanketed the ground with a fine layer of debris with a high concentration of iridium, an element that is very rare on Earth but present in meteorites. Time turned it into a strata of rock, one that can currently be seen in many places all over the world.

Some scholars place the beginning of the Anthropocene in the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, or in the agricultural revolution that happened in the Neolithic Age. Yet there is only one first global synchronic event in modern history that can be read in the rock formations of the earth: the Trinity Test. The radioactive particles emitted by the explosion can be found everywhere on the crust of planet Earth and they are dated to the same period. Most members of the Working Group of the Anthropocene have accepted that, geologically speaking, the Test is a synchronic global event. This makes it a valid marker of the beginning of the Anthropocene.

The date of the beginning of the Anthropocene is irrelevant to our purposes. However, what that beginning is associated with is not, as this shapes the narrative of the epoch as whole. The fact that this

precise moment has been chosen is highly meaningful. When a film is edited, one image “attracts” the next, as in a chain reaction. The initial image has a force that makes you place a particular image, and none other, next to it. That shapes the story, and the shapes of stories have real consequences because stories shape our perception of the world.

When Donna Haraway proposes “the Chthulucene” (almost a joke, but not quite) as an alternative name for our time, she is talking precisely about the importance of narrative. She proposes Chthulucene because it invokes a very different story, one of “becoming with” all the species that inhabit this planet. Haraway’s story offers a more livable scenario and one that is just more playful.

GLOBAL

STRANGEMENT

The Trinity test was a “great success” and in the wake of the test, J. Robert Oppenheimer was quoted as saying (and this is not a line from Dr. Strangelove), “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” 4 A real drama. One of such scope as to be geological.

At the site where The Gadget exploded, there is now an obelisk—another quite phallic object—as a reminder of that majestic event.

I was there in 2016. While some tourists take selfies next to the plaque that says “Trinity Site Where The World’s First Nuclear Device Was Exploded On July 16, 1945,” others try to find some trinite on the ground.

In “Allegories of the Anthropocene” Elizabeth M. Deloughrey examines how the nomenclature and images evoked by this event are related to the divine. The name “Trinity Test,” for instance, “suggests that human technology emanating from the divine is a hallmark of Anthropocene discourse of the Anthropos as a ‘god species.’” Furthermore, the obelisk “is not only a cosmographic instrument whose shadow located time and latitude; its very form denotes a beam of light that signifies divine illumination; for Christians, this divine light derives from the Holy Trinity.” 5 “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” 6 If that’s the case, what kind of stories would this first detonating imagery prompt? If the Anthropocene was a film, what kind of film would it be? Or, put another way, if the Anthropocene was a scenario, a movie set, the Anthropo-scene, what kind of stories would unfold in it? Perhaps it’s not just a coincidence that in Twin Peaks Revolution, 2018, David Lynch (SPOILER ALERT) sets the origin of the evil that permeates both the show and its antagonist Killer Bob in the Trinity Test explosion. As the mushroom cloud ex-

plodes, a set of evil seeds are spread, and inside one of these sperm-like seeds, we can see killer Bob advancing towards us.

The Anthropocene is a geological drama. The notion of it adds a new even more dramatic dimension to the global ecological crisis, one that conveys an even more temporal and profound sense of human impact on Earth. A drama of geological proportions; of catastrophic potential. It posits the anthropos, the human, as the central cause of this uncanny time we live in and it urges us to think, to take responsibility, and act accordingly. But the concept of the Anthropocene has a dual nature. On one hand, “it can be used to establish an inherent link between capitalism and the modern way of life, and thus alert us to the injustices of the ever-encroaching neoliberal market logic that has now absorbed nature and climate under its remit. However, it can also be mobilized to praise human ingenuity and problem-solving skills, and to promote capital-driven solutions to climate change, such as nuclear fission, carbon-offsetting, and geoengineering.” 7 The Anthropocene has become a frame through which we see the world and ourselves. But this frame, even if it presents itself as objective, it is subjective. Like the other metanarratives of our time—capitalism, for example—has become so ubiquitous as to appear normal, neutral, and objective. In reality, however, the Anthropocene has a strong subjectivity. What desires and mourning structures does the Anthropocene convey? In the Anthropo(s)cene many stories can unfold; stories of a tragic worldview within a pre-apocalyptic history, one that grieves for the end of nature (as if nature was something humans—or certain specific humans, anyway—could put an end to) or even one that speculates with accelerationist dreams of sublime collapse. “The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.” 8

The Trinity Test coincided with the beginning of the so-called Great Acceleration. From that point onward, population growth and usage of natural resources would increase exponentially. The curves representing these increases, never really flattened. Ontologically speaking, acceleration is not something that is sustained for very long in natural processes. It’s a rather short process. A branch that breaks from a tree accelerates as it falls, then suddenly stops when it hits the ground seconds later. A deer population grows exponentially for a couple of years until there isn’t enough grass to sustain any new individuals. The contagion rate in humans of a certain virus rises exponentially, only to peak a few months later (perhaps a few years, depending on the epoch and the type of virus) before slowing down.

Like many other objects that represented an era of mass consumption and home comforts, including washing machines and televisions, the jet engine came into widespread use around 1945, when it began to be used in commercial airplanes. This changed the perception we had of the planet. Suddenly, distance was measured not in miles but in time. The jet engine also propelled the growth of tourism drastically, allowing people (mostly rich Westerners) to visit remote places all over the world. The invention of the jet engine also led to the concept of jetlag, and one could argue that the world has been jet lagged ever since.

The abundance of easily-accessible, high-octane, cheap fossil fuels in the mid 20th century thrust forward the project of modernity to the point that the world got ahead of itself. Too fast to catch up with itself, the world got out of this world. The ecological footprint is a good indicator of this. According to the Global Footprint Network, we now need 1.5 Earths to satisfy our current demands and desires. But that’s a global figure. If everyone in the world lived as Americans do, we would need 5 Earths to support humanity. Like the ghostly trace left behind by an object in motion in a long-exposure photograph, the resource-finite real Earth is ever trying to catch up with the “infinite” and virtual one that is ahead of it, projected into the future. Hence the global jet lag.

The availability of natural resources sets the limits to growth.

But availability is relative, and as technology gets better at sucking calories from the earth, those limits seem to be pushed ever further. How-

ever, as Bruno Latour describes it in his book Down to Earth, Politics in the New Climatic Regime, the modernization project has literally run out of land, substratum, and physical space in which to further develop.

According to Latour, this realization caused many of the sociopolitical changes we are witnessing globally at the moment, such as Brexit, the refugee crisis or the Trump phenomenon. “The new affinity for borders among people who had advocated their systemic dismantling is already confirming the end of one concept of globalization.” As there is no more apparent benefit to sharing a planet with the rest of the world and as sharing would imply agreement with international environmental treaties, the world’s most voracious countries decided to withdraw.

As George H. W. Bush said at the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 “our lifestyle is not negotiable.” The climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues and as such it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality.

The pressure that the modernity project applies to the physical limits of the planet has resulted in anthropogenic climate change, infrastructural ruin, mass extinction, growing wealth inequality, geopolitical failure, ocean acidification, air pollution, soil degradation, and so on.

We know environmental catastrophe is on the horizon. So why have we done little or nothing to change our lifestyles? What lies in the spell of capitalism that makes us succumb to its pleasures to the point that we put our own survival at risk? This paradox fascinates me. It conveys a strange global state of mind, an uncanny feeling which I have tried to describe using the concept of Hyperdough.

A few weeks ago I had a Proustian epiphany. I was passing by the city center here in Amsterdam while biking back home. All of a sudden, the smell of sweet fried dough coming from the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts hit my olfactory receptors. It happened under the Christmas lights at dusk, that particular time of the day when the natural light is about to be replaced by the artificial lights from the city. At this precise moment, the glowing billboards and displays from the stores had about the same intensity as that of the remaining daylight. Both together created a flat and shadowless world. A kind of fake atmosphere

in which, despite the sensorial overload of stimuli around, something feels missing. As if it were hyperreal CGI rendering of reality.

Along with the smell of dough, a warm airwave coming out of a shopping center caressed my face. It felt nice and soothing, like a spell that makes you succumb to the delights of capitalism. This intoxicating, numbing seduction transported me to the main commercial street of any capital city in the world where I had been before. I could have been in Barcelona, Rome, New York, or Hong Kong. I had the sensation that all of them belonged to the same abstract, homogeneous, and ubiquitous mass; that moment in time was not just a moment in Amsterdam. It was happening simultaneously everywhere else, too. As if all time zones had melted into one and jet lag was not really an option, but a permanent state of mind. Lacking of a better name for it, I’m calling this sensation/concept/object/whatever it isHyperdough.

If there were a Wikipedia entry on Hyperdough, it’d look like this:

If there were an entrance of Hyperdough in Urban Dictionary it’d go like this:

Hyperdough fills up your mouth so nicely when you say it… HY.PER.DOUGH. It’s like biting into a good piece of coffee cake with chocolate Kahlua ganache in your gentrified neighborhood’s new organic-gluten-free-fair-trade café.. That sweet and caffeinated momentary ecstasy—which is opposed, by the way, to the dark and violent history of sugar and coffee—that makes you think that everything is just fine.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”10 and sometimes one could think that ecology itself has been accomplished by neoliberalism. Because by now we know that capitalism doesn’t break, it bends. This rather pessimistic view may indicate a crisis of imagination when it comes to foreseeing an alternative. But does the Anthropocene allow for anything other than a tragic worldview? The truth is that, given the predictions of the scientific community, imagining the end of the world is not difficult; all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios are fed into the collective imagination by various media and institutions, too. And end-times thinking isn’t just easier––there is even something morbidly appealing about it. That’s why accelerationism is somehow seductive. “It’s a political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or

critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. That is, the only way out of it is through it.”11 Considering both the disappointing environmental policies of recent decades and he ecological disaster we clearly seem to be heading toward, accelerationism could appear to be the ultimate chance for real, explosive transformation—even though it requires going through a destructive process. Ethics aside, this longing for sublime collapse is interesting. There is something cathartic about feeding and accelerating the death flow that our civilization conveys. It appeals to the necessity of radical change and it taps into a widely-held feeling that in order to start building the new, one must first destroy the old. I wonder how this feeling could be channeled through the moving image, in some sort of filmic ritual.

Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble” however, invites us to go in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of spending energy on projecting ourselves into the future, she suggests we stay in the mud of the present. This means facing the instability of our time by deeply acknowledging and making alliances with the other species that share our planet. I align myself with this way of thinking.

However, before we can move forward, an act of letting go is required. Something must be left behind, and to overcome the global ecological crisis, we will need to profoundly restructure our values. That will mean thinking outside the old business-as-usual logic that got us in this situation in the first place. My work aspires to open up a cinematic space for reflection that can, at least for a few moments, decenter us from this anthropocentric way of thinking. The same way one succumbs to the comforts of capitalism, one can also succumb to the delights of the moving image.

LIVING

RUINS

I’m intrigued by the apparent normality with which our everyday life goes on, given the dark future that is predicted to lie ahead of us. In that sense, I am interested in the strange feeling of collapse that Hong Kong evokes in me. In my opinion, everyone on the planet experiences that feeling in one way or another. However, these days it’s become normalized, creating a weird atmosphere.

In my films, the departure point is very often a physical place that I sense conveys some of the topics I’m interested in. By “sense”, I mean responding to a combination of aesthetic and conceptual connections prompted by what I know about the place and that I don’t need to rationalize too much. It’s like location scouting for a nonexistent film, one that hasn’t even been conceived of yet, much less written. I called this “location scouting for a phantom film”.

Hong Kong is a locus of that paradoxical interplay between capitalism and the ecological crisis that fascinates me. There are various seed-like aspects to Hong Kong that have caught my eye, such as the duality of city and jungle; postcolonial neoliberal history; defiantly futuristic architecture; finance; mass tourism; a record-high wealth gap; the diaspora of Filipino domestic workers; massive container ship traffic; the mystic New Age scene; Hong Kong’s representation in cinema; and the trading of exotic animal products (ivory, shark fin, rhino horn).

My memory of this city is tinged with admiration for such a marvelous human achievement of urban development mixed with a decaying dystopian cyberpunk vision.

Being in a place, sensing it, is key for me. Starting a film from location scouting, apart from being somehow subversive, also helps me to surface the atmosphere conveyed by that place. In this way, I start from context rather than from story, bringing the background to the foreground. I find this method highly relevant to the uncanny contemporary context we live in and which is precisely the object of my studies.

Cinema, with its potential to subvert time and space, is a great medium for working in this direction. It can offer a liminal space that is ideal terrain for stepping out and reflecting upon our epoch. My aim is to find ways to expand this liminality.

To this end, I tried out different experiments to see where they would bring me. In the next piece (link below), I use imagery from an

ongoing experiment I also call Hyperdough. The footage of this experiment, taken in Hong Kong, was digitally slowed down by 50%. One second of footage, therefore, becomes two; since the footage was recorded at 24 frames per second, 24 frames become 48. However, out of those 48 frames, 24 were created by the software. They are not “real.”

They were never really registered. When I remove the “real” frames, the ones I actually filmed with the camera, we again have one second of footage and 24 frames, all of them interpolated by the computer. With these “fake” frames as source footage, I start different slowing-down processes in which the main focus is to extend these machine interpolations as much as possible. Time and space gets weirdly subverted and the eerie feeling I’m after arises. * If you want to watch this experiment please scan the QR code below. (There is no need to stop the sound recording.)

Atmosphere, or ambiance, is an evasive thing, and not easy to frame. When we turn the camera towards it, it can easily dissolve. I find that in order to talk about atmosphere, we have to talk about something else that articulates it. It’s a sort of Negative Theology; the thing we want to approach becomes present via our not talking about it directly. Onscreen, we can only see the wind when it moves a tree or shakes the main character’s hair. In this regard, I find that working with personal micro narratives, rather than big, overarching ones that go from A to B over the course of a whole film, can be fruitful. The characters in a micro narrative articulate the atmosphere they are in. They momentarily suck us into a scene or set of actions. Then we are out again, wandering.

Precisely when I was wandering around Hong Kong, despite how fancy and high-tech the city sometimes appeared to be, what I often saw was a living ruin. A city that is the result of an archaic yet ever-updating system. It feels both new and obsolete at the same time.

It’s a ruin but still in place and surprisingly alive. Like a living ghost. It’s a place that operates according to an old, fossil-making, self-perpetuating logic Like Timothy Morton’s concept of agrilogistics, this logic is a sort of program that has been executing itself since the beginning of the Neolithic. A kind of loop. And it’s actually the feeling of being in a loop that describes, to certain extent, this time we live in. Due perhaps to a crisis of imagination, the future has already been exhausted by dark predictions, and as the theologian Catherine Keller suggests, “we stand in an unfinished history of apocalyptic finalities.” We inhabit a strange cinematic loop, as in Edge of Tomorrow, in which Tom Cruise dies again and again in a myriad of possible ways. How does the worldview provided by the notion of the Anthropocene feed into this loop?

And is it possible to get out of it? Like a worldview that provides a diagnosis about the state of the planet but doesn’t offer a possibility for healing, the Anthropocene may be seen as a dead end. However, there is something attractive about it. Something that may be worth looking at, not to reinforce the loop or feed it back upon itself, but, on the contrary, to let it conclude. In Hong Kong, I started envisioning a sort of film like a dark meditation that can also act as a farewell ritual.

I also paid attention to the alleys, to that minimum space between one skyscraper and the next. I stared, fascinated, at the endless, exhausting network of pipes and air conditioning systems placed there.

I looked behind the scenes of the city, wondering what held this beast together, preventing it from falling apart? Given the enormous wealth gap in the city, what is it that keeps people going? This brought me to the idea of progress, understood as an indicator of improvement in human condition. Somehow, the promise that progress conveys sustains this old logic, which these days we call “capitalism.” I started looking at progress like a continuum, like time and space, ubiquitous. Something that gets passed from one generation to the next and whose only raison d’être is its promise of a better (future) time. Because that’s the greatest promise of capitalism, that each generation will rise, on the shoulders of the one before as a result of the natural workings of

a market economy. But looking at where my parents were at my age (they had steady jobs, four kids, a house, a summer house, two cars, and so on—and comparing it to where I am—without any of those things, though I don’t mind not having the four kids—it’s clear that that promise is no longer a given. Progress stopped making sense. Precarity is the new normal; we are living in “the ruins of capitalism.”12 But even though the dream of a better future is pretty hollow by now, many of us still live our lives as if it isn’t. This may be strange, but, what else are we left with if we let go of the traditional idea of human progress?

AT

THE

BEACH

WITH

THE

TECHNO

FOSSILS

Everything we see around us will turn into stone some day. At “The Beach of The Anthropocene,” a name I have given to the beach I visited with Dr. Cearreta, the geologist, this comes across very clearly.

Dr. Cearreta told me that the beach was a candidate for “the golden spike” (a label granted to the best spot or strata in the world for a scientist to observe a particular geological era) of the Anthropocene. This beach is located in an area called Tunelboca which literally translates as “tunnel mouth”, at the end of a long underground tunnel that goes all the way to Bilbao, the biggest city in the Basque Country. The purpose of this tunnel was to send Bilbao’s unfiltered sewage straight to the sea, following the old saying “the solution to pollution is dissolution”.

The tunnel was in use for almost a century. Back in those days, Bilbao was a very industrial city, well-known for its blast furnace and other big factories, including shipyards. That industry was active for over a century, up until the 1980s. The residues and debris it generated were supposed to be dumped in the deep sea a few miles offshore. However, to save fuel and time, they were just dumped very close to the shore, where the river meets the sea near Tunelboca. Somehow, and it’s not entirely clear how this worked, the bacteria from the Bilbao’s dirty, fecal water combined with the calcium carbonate in seawater to create a particular limestone crystal that up until that time had only existed in the Bahamas. This crystal acted as cement, and along with the sand at the bottom of the sea, it petrified all the debris and residue from the factories. A new kind of stone was formed in the bottom of the sea.

Then it was just a matter of time and a few storms, before pieces of this stone surfaced and were brought to the beach by the waves. On the beach today, there is a roughly four-meter-high layer of solid rock that contains all kinds of material and objects from the industrial days of Bilbao; bricks with dates and names on them, metal pieces, bits of plastic—all turned to stone. These are technofossils. There is nothing like this documented anywhere else in the world.

These rocks offer an uncanny image, one that fuels sci-fi speculation. The fossils embedded in them are traces of an epoch that is very familiar to us and our lifestyle. A process that usually takes millions of years is truncated here, foreshortened as if in by a wormhole, and we are faced with a temporal paradox; our recent history is fossilized, as if we’ve traveled at the speed of light and came back to Earth a couple of years later only to find out, like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes,

that our trip took too long and all we knew is now not only gone, but turned to stone.

The Anthropocene presents us with a similar time-travel-oriented mental acrobatics. “We live with the uncanny sense of existing on two timescales simultaneously: everyday actions feeding into processes that extend far beyond our lifetimes.”13 However, coming into terms with this seems key in order to deal with our current lifestyle’s longterm effects on Earth. “Ecology, after all, is the thinking of beings on a number of different scales, none of which has priority over the other.”14 But can we engage with other time scales rather than our own? This almost sci-fi question becomes relevant when it comes to not only understanding the rest of the living and non-living entities we share the planet with but also establishing new alliances with them. “Interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now material for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings.”15 In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that in order to survive in the ruins of capitalism we must find ways of collaborating with other species. To do so, we must know what these species need, which other species they can and can’t live with and who they can’t, where they are, and so on. Positive sciences are key to learning these things, as they provide factual knowledge about the entities in question. However, can we engage with them other than on the scientific level? If so, how? Can storytelling be a way to do this? Can cinema provide a terrain for earthly narrative entanglements?

THE

MORE-THAN-HERO

When we take the more-than-human into the realm of storytelling, it becomes the more-than-hero. The hero can also be a lion, for instance, true, but we know that lion will be one whose heroic quest no lion would understand—that is, an anthropomorphic lion more human than anything else.

In a traditional story, a hero is minding his own business when he receives the call for adventure. He answers the call, and off he goes on his epic, three-act quest, a search for bounty or an elixir of some sort; in the end, he comes back and redeems the world. But the hero’s journey would be nothing without the soil he walks on or the bushes he hides in. Everything, that is, that allows his story to unfold.

A spear, considered the first human tool-weapon, is a big part of this traditional way of telling stories. A hunter-hero goes on a quest to kill prey with his spear, then returns to the cave triumphant. There he tells his story, which will later be retold in many different ways by others. However, in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin posits that the first human tool was not a weapon, a spear, but a container of some sort used to carry food or drink water from. This changes the perspective. “If one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-Arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one. It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.”

Instead of relating a hero’s quest, why not to make a film that tells a multiplicity of stories embedded in a place, in the stones that form the landscape, a container where some particular humans roam.

Perhaps instead of having, say, two scientists walking on the coastal stones—as we’ll see later in my research project—we have rocks, pools, mussels, waves, and humans around. However, the conventions of traditional storytelling won’t make it easy. There is a lot of undoing, unlearning, deindustrializing, and decolonizing to be done in order to tell stories in a different way. Especially in a medium as industrial as the moving image. To be sure, the aim of my research projects is to

challenge those conventions, especially when we are talking about dissenting against an old logic that put us on the verge of an ecological catastrophe. But what are the traditional cinematic means that allow the hero and the more-than-hero to intertwine? Can we recycle them?

In one of the first scenes of Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, John Travolta, who plays a b-movie sound technician, is making some sound recordings on the outskirts of the city. He points his super directional shotgun mic all around him, capturing the sounds of far-away elements.

He hears far-away things as if they are very close. He hears a frog on the distant riverside and wind rustling in the treetops he must be one of the best sound guys in the world as he makes a crystal-clear recording of the wind without a windshield—as if his ears were barely a few centimeters away from them. The background is in the foreground. In a series of shots, we move away from Travolta, further with every cut, until finally we see him in the distance. Now the frog is in first place. That is, the hero in the background and the non-hero in the foreground.

In a similar manner, a mysterious owl comes to prominence. But this happens in an interesting way, using an old-fashioned cinematographic tool: the split diopter. This concave glass is placed on the front of the lens, separating it into two halves and allowing each to have its own focal distance; this allows two different points of focus—in other words, two different objects, each one in a different distance from the lens, are in focus simultaneously. In a shot that appears impossible, both the owl in the extreme foreground and Travolta in the background are in focus.

The hero and the more-than-hero are at the same level on screen.

But are we looking at John Travolta listening to the landscape around him or are we listening to the landscape ourselves? Probably both; Travolta and his interactions with his surroundings turn out to be the “carrier bag” this time, a narrative vehicle through which our awareness of the environment in which the hero’s story unfolds is enhanced. This only happens momentarily in the film, and I doubt that Brian de Palma was concerned with the non-human question, but in this rather literal and Hollywoodian example we can see how through a human narrative, the background surfaces into the plot of the film and the more-than-hero becomes part of the narrative.

Now, how can we expand this cinematic time-space in which the environment and the narrative tissue of the film are one? How can we dissolve the hero with his surroundings, to the point that there is no hero and all characters are main characters? Broadly speaking, the conventions of storytelling tell us that when a human character is on screen, we’ll empathize with this person. It’s in our nature; we’re wired that way. But I believe this is an opportunity to engage with the other-than-human rather than a handicap. The human onscreen becomes a kind of channeler. She is part of the medium of the moving image, but unlike the photosensitive material, this human material reacts not only to the photons that bounce back and forth in the environment but also to its smells, surfaces, and temperature. She touches the nonhuman on our behalf—licks it, eats it, pees on it—and it reacts in a moreor less-noticeable way depending on many factors, chief among them how closely we look.

One could say that there is a total lack of interest in that which surrounds a human character once he is on screen. I think it’s a matter of pulling in and out. One one hand, it’s about building a narrative open enough to let us wander and pay attention to both the space in which the story unfolds and its non-human elements; on the other, the narrative should be tight enough to further the story along.

THE

HUMAN

QUESTION

In recent years, there have been many films dealing with the concept of the Anthropocene. Very often, these films aspire to decenter us from the Anthropocentric view that seems to have corrupted our gaze on the world. In order to do so, they portray a world without humans; the premise is usually that humans have disappeared or gone extinct, or perhaps are just minding their own business somewhere in the background as the non-human takes up the role of protagonist. This removal of the human is done to different degrees; a lonely drone ostensibly piloted by AI takes “random” shots of the frozen landscape of Antarctica, or a tripod-mounted camera captures a series of post-apocalyptic postcards picturing the remains left behind by homo sapiens all over the planet.

Grossly generalizing, these “Anthropocenic” films are often, in my opinion, thought-provoking yet ice-cold. They address very pressing questions about the current ecological crisis with very little human warmth. Keeping away any “human touch” is often their goal and point, of course. They convey a tone of a requiem for our civilization, a tragic view of a world where everything about us is already lost. They are versions of the end of our world in which, despite our disappearance—, good news!, The course of nature still carries on. Gaia will prevail, no doubt. This is when the Anthropocene becomes a frame for mourning not the end of nature, but the end of us. These films make us reflect upon our temporary presence on this planet, they humble us.

A dose of this is certainly necessary to counterbalance the anthropocentric zeitgeist way of thinking of our time. However, I wonder if they offer any sense of possibility. Life on the planet will go on without us, sure, so now what?

It’s this decentering effect, in favor of engaging with the non-human, that I’m trying to achieve in my research project Permanent Being.

However, I don’t think that tackling the question of anthropocentrism means removing the human from the picture. On the contrary, it means embedding the human in the picture to the point that it is just another more entity, one equal to the non-human. Yes, it’s about paying attention and listening to the non-human, but I see that as a relational matter. The non-human question, as its name indicates, is actually a human question, so removing the anthropos from the picture doesn’t seem like

the best way to address it. The non-human exists because of the human and vice versa; not as its opposite, but as what it is not. Each defines the other. The human must stay in the picture.

PERMANENT

BEING

This research project called Permanent Being fueled my artistic research, allowing me to put into practice and reflect upon different ideas and methods. Because constant conversation with space is key in my filmmaking, this work-in-progress film is strongly attached to a particular location. As explained before, my films are often conceived around particular places; rather than scouting for a location, I scout for a film on location. This allows me to work with impure cinematic entanglements rather than with enlightened romantic distance. The different living and non-living entities of a place, their rhythms and forces, shape the film in a trascendental manner.

The absurdity of the global ecological crisis and the Anthropocene is that they occur on a geological time scale, something humans can barely attempt to grasp. But we can attempt, and in this project I use different cinematic means to do so. This geological drama takes a different shape. It’s a drama not in the catastrophic sense but the narrative one, a kind of storytelling whose speculative tentacles are interwoven with the temporality of the stones. Not necessarily a tragic one.

Permanent Being is a dramatic exploration of the stories embedded in a flysch—a kind of natural geological formation— on the Basque Coast. In this place, a large part of the history of our planet is literally written in stone. All kinds of global events are recorded in the vertical rock strata of these coastal cliffs: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the inversion of the magnetic poles, and even past global warmings. Each strata is a long-exposure photograph registering the image of a longgone world. If one day our current time is also turned into stone, how will it be remembered? The film operates on the assumption that these rocks are a sort of memory not only records the transformations of the Earth over eons, but also the memories of those who walk on them.

Some of my own dearest childhood memories were embedded in these stones. They belong to the time I spent with my family at the flysch, in a place called Sakoneta. This small cove used to be very difficult to reach, so almost no one would dare to go there, especially not with kids.. That meant that during the summer, when all the beaches around were crowded, my family and I had the place to ourselves.

My father built some makeshift stairs and tied a rope to the roots of some bushes, which we could then use to rappel down the cliff. To my

with the magnificence of the place, has attracted a rise in domestic and international tourism. In just a few years it has gone from being a secluded place to become massified.

Still from Permanent Being

However, if we compare the flysch of Sakoneta with the rest of the Basque Coast this place is barely humanized. It’s something like a miracle that it’s as little developed as it is, in fact.. In the 1970s, the electric company Iberduero S.A bought land in the current Geopark in order to build a nuclear plant like the one that they had already built a few kilometers away in Lemoiz, also on the Basque Coast. The independentist Basque terrorist group ETA, however, had murdered the main engineer in charge of the Lemoiz plant, in order to force the Spanish government to halt the project. The power plant was already built––it just needed the reactor to start working. But strong social opposition to the project together with, according to some sources, ETA’s violence, made the government shutter the installation for good. What remains now is the ruins of a huge, relatively modern nuclear complex that was never put to work. This event left the coastal land bought by the electric company in a sort of legal limbo and nothing has been built since, leaving the place pretty much pristine.

But as important as all these human affairs have been, their sig-

nificance seems to dissolve when we put them in perspective next to the time scale represented by the stones when we put them in perspective with the time of the stones. Permanent Being is a geological drama that explores the boundaries between our human time scale and that of the rocks. In order to do so, it intertwines a set of stories, both real and fictional, that are rooted in this extraordinary landscape.

SYNOPSIS The film opens with a piece of dark, underexposed Super 8 film. All we see is film grain and some analogue artefacts.

Amongst the sounds of the seaside, a song sung in Basque by four voices heard in the distance. It is a nostalgic song––but what is it that it longs for?

The texture of the celluloide conveys the way we used to see and register the world. We move slowly among giant vertical rock strata in colorful Super 8. We hear three voices, which seem to be coming from within the stones, speaking simultaneously in Basque. They tell the story of a group of people that became trapped by a high tide that lasted twenty thousand years. After millenia waiting on a little rock promontory surrounded by the sea, the tide recedes and they discover that they have become nothing but another rock strata of the cliff.

When the image shifts to scope and black and white, we see a scientist from a distant future and his peculiar young assistant exploring this same geological site. Equipped with different technologies to measure the terrain, they set out to investigate the area. They are in search of a particular rock strata, one that recorded a mysterious and disruptive past event.

We observe the tasks they undertake and their interactions with the space, which look like a ritual we don’t completely understand. On the one hand, the impassible stone, and on the other, the human. Two almost irreconcilable temporalities.

After a long time searching, the scientist begins to de-

spair of finding the strata he’s looking for. Just as he’s about to give up, however, his assistant, guided by a primordial force lingering in the nostalgic Basque song that opened the film, finds the right spot. The scientist sets up his gear and an immersion to look into the depths of the stone begins.

The device the scientist uses sees the world in a completely different way than the human eye does. It is a world defined by millions of white dots. Aesthetically strange, and in moments sublime, it takes us on a sensorial trip that dissolves the boundaries between the human and geological time scales.

After this trip we once again arrive in a different time.

It feels like our current time. The image is in color now. We see wide, landscape shots of the cliffs by the sea just before sunrise. Slowly, we start seeing different people interacting with the stones. Most are visitors, trying to register their present time with their cell phones. In the background, coming from the loudspeakers of a tourist boat, the distant voice of a tour guide can be heard explaining the planetary happenings recorded in these rocks and the vicissitudes of their histories. Is this the disruptive event the explorers were looking for?

ACTORS AS SENSITIVE DEVICES While location scouting for a phantom film in the cliffs, I began to develop the story of Celso, a scientist from a distant future and his helper, Roke—who has an intellectual disability—exploring this geological site. We watch them walk out into the landscape, passing strata after strata. We observe Celso carrying out different scientific calculations, like a ritual we cannot completely comprehend. He takes different rock samples, touching them, scratching them with his fingernails to test their toughness, and making them react to different liquids. He’s looking for something. Roke, in the meantime, has a more intuitive and sensorial way of “measuring” the landscape. We see him mesmerized by the sound of the little pebbles that continuously fall down the cliffs like a waterfall of rocks, putting his hand on a tide pool so little fish eat the dead skin from his hand, and urinating on the surface of a stra-

ta full of fossils, leaving a visible mark (though just a temporary one, whichsoon evaporates). If Celso is mind, Roke is heart.

Permanent Being is my first time working with actors. I think of these actors as sensitive devices for tapping into the non-human, tentacles that entangle themselves with the elements of the landscape, organic and otherwise, surfacing a myriad of micro narratives otherwise hidden under strata of traditional storytelling conventions. Vehicles that carry us through the place the film arises from and in which it plays out, that keep us going deeper into the multiplicity of stories, bringing us in and out of different time scales. Actors, by their actions and interactions, dissolve the human scale into that of the rest of the more-than-human beings.

Still from Permanent Being

I see this fiction as a ball I bounce back and forth against these rocks. I wonder how staging could allow for certain qualities of this landscape, especially the time paradox, to arise. How, on other words, to articulate this space through mis en scène. The specifics of the fictional story don’t matter too much; just a few strong points in the script are needed. What happens between them is left to a mix of improvisation and serendipity. I want to leave room to allow the moment and the landscape to have an effect on the decisions we make on the spot.

Ideally, the human and non-human elements of the film —that is, Roke, the rocks, the sea anemones, Celso, the sea urchins, and so on—are at the same level of significance in the film.

Can fiction give agency to the -more-than-human? Scientific in quiry itself starts as fiction. That is, a hypothesis that has to be proved right or wrong. In storytelling, the equivalent to that hypothesis is the “what if?” According to what science tells us, the flych’s rock strata are like memories, ones that can be retrieved through different scientific means. For example, by studying the chemistry of a particular strata, geologists can know what the atmosphere of the planet was like back when the sediments that compose that strata were deposited in the bottom of the sea. But what if these - rocks could, for instance, also re member a song from the past? What if they could actively communi cate? This is where science ends and science fiction begins, an extension of our epistemological tools in order to understand the world and give “speculative agency” to the more-than-human. No one is saying that those rocks can sing a long-forgotten song. What’s important is that the possibility of them doing so is proposed. Establishing a fictional a context in which to inter premise like this gives actors a framework, act with the rocks. The script and the direction are kept open enough so the actors have room to intuitively interact with the elements around them while the camera is rolling. The - goal is to contaminate the narra tive of the film with the non-human presence of the location.

Something interesting happened while shooting during the first experimentation period. The place where we were filming wasn’t easy to reach and we had to walk quite a distance from the car so bringing the equipment was time-consuming and a big effort. As everyone knew we were going to film in the Flysch, which isa well-known place in the Basque Country, I expected that they’d be able to walk on the rocks.

That wasn’t the case. My DOP and - the wardrobe person could bare ly move from place to place. When they did, it would take them way too long to do so. Given the circumstances, no matter how skillful they were at their craft, that made them pretty much useless for the job.

On top of that, they were afraid that a rock—one that hasn’t moved in thousands of years)—would fall on their heads or that the tide would come in and trap them. By the second day of shooting, they told me they couldn’t do the job and left. That was very disappointing, but soon

after, things started to flow much better. We reduced the gear that we needed and I took charge of the cinematography, something I love doing anyways. The two helpers, the sound designer, the two actors and I started to move very organically in the landscape. We were pushed by the tide which was getting closer all the time. This created a time pressure to that written into the script. With no one to slow us down, we were able to film in extremis in many places before the last wave would wash us away. We were completely swallowed up by the landscape and this situation, and that no doubt made its way into what we filmed. At some point, when we were exhausted and being pushed by the waves, one of the actors said that he finally truly felt the essence of the film.

I found this dialogue between the script and the real conditions of the shooting very interesting. The tidal forces were not only shaping the rocks of the cliff but also the narrative of the film.

ARROWS OF TIME Making a film in a non-heroic way means that there is no arrow of time. As the stories of the small and the big (in size) are intertwined, there is a multiplicity of time arrows pointing in all directions, like a disorientated compass. But how can one engage with time scales other than that of the human? I wonder if image-making technology can allow us to do so.

The word “develop,� means to unwrap, unfold or uncover. In the photographic sense, to develop a film means to induce the chemical changes necessary to cause the latent image on the celuloide to become visible. Therefore, to unveil something, it has to first be concealed. The act of revealing by first obscuring seems inherent to the very nature of cinema.

The moving image can be a scientific tool when it comes to seeing more than the human eye allows. A macro lens can allow us to see very small things that otherwise pass unnoticed close up. A zoom lens brings unreachable objects like the moon very close to our eyes. As the magnitude of what we are witnessing changes dramatically from our regular way of seeing, this can feel somehow unnatural, though mes-

merizing, as if our scale in relation to it had changed.The use of these lenses reveals a world that used to be hidden to us. New developments in image-making technology can also produce more obscure results, though. The ultrahigh photosensitivity of video sensors in new cameras can see much more in the darkness than humans can, and in color. The image they render as a result of this is somehow strange, like an inverted day-for-night effect —that is, night for day. A thermal or infrared camera can capture in color the change in temperature in a horse’s corpse as it slowly cools down. “As the image reveals something of an invisible reality, the image thus also becomes a surface that covers up other realities”.16 The result is abstract and uncanny. However, it shows a powerful natural event.

At some point in Permanent Being, we see the entrance of a cave defined by millions of white and red points against a black background. This image has been registered with a LiDAR scanner. LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) is a technology used in different fields that deal with space, including architecture, geology, and geography.

This technology allows one to scan the space and create a cloud of millions of points. This cloud is a virtual environment that represents the space that has been scanned. Each point is geo-referenced in space and one can freely (virtually) move within the scanned terrain.

There is an aesthetic-conceptual resonance between the point clouds and the materiality of these particular rocks. This geological site is primarily made of limestone, a sedimentary rock made up of very small particles. The LiDAR allows us to immerse ourselves in the physicality of the stone and its particular nature. I am interested in experimenting with the images created with this device in order to create a filmic cleft with the aspiration of reaching closer to the temporal scale of the rocks.

Using software, the LiDAR landscape outlined by the points can be decomposed and re-composed in order to create new abstract or figurative landscapes. The particles can also be made to react to sound.

One of the goals is to create a “feedback system” in which the points react to the sounds recorded at the source with different mics—a contact mic placed on the rocks or underwater mics, for example. The millions

surprise, they still remain there. We would spend hours playing naked on the rocks, searching for the sea creatures that inhabited the little lagoons left by the low tide. When sea anemones or jellyfishes stung us, we would pee on our skin to heal the wound, as the good old scientifically-not-approved 90s remedy dictated. Of course, we didn’t know that in every step we took on those rock strata we moved forwards or backwards millions of years in time. A few steps would take us from the Triassic to the Jurassic and a few more, from the Jurassic to the Cretassic. This place holds a strong time paradox for me, that’s why with this feature film I want to look at the almost-impossible-to-grapple-with coexistence of personal narratives and unfathomable deep time.

In many mythological universes,particularly Indo-European ones, storms, lightning, thunder and wind originate from the sky. The ancient Basque animistic understanding was different placing the origin of these natural phenomena underground, in caves and chasms.

The most important goddess and the personification of the Earth, Mari, often creates the storms. According to the legends of the Basque Country, the Earth (Lurra) is a giant infinite hull containing the souls of the dead, the gods, and most mythological characters inside it.

Scientists from all over the world have been coming to the Basque Country to study the different Earth events that happened in the past, in order to understand the future. They say that these rocks show us that time is cyclical: whatever occurred previously will happen again. Understanding these stones and reconciling with them could therefore be key to the survival of the human race, especially in times of ecological crisis. We live with the uncanny sense of existing on two timescales simultaneously, our everyday actions feeding into processes that extend far beyond our lifetimes. I believe that we must be able to tell stories that make us aware of the scale of our presence on Earth.

How can we think from and with the stones?

Lately, it isn’t only scientists that come to the Basque country. In recent years, the region has been highly promoted by Basque Country Tourism and became part of the worldwide network of Global Geoparks Network. Furthermore, many films, advertisements, and TV series—including Game Of Thrones—have been shot here. All of this, combined

of virtual points are like the particles that give shape to the sedimentary rocks of the karstik landscape of the Flysch. The aim is to experiment with these point clouds, nudging them towards abstraction in order to dissolve ourselves within the stones like the limestone does in water.

This world is one where things just change shape.

Still from Permanent Being. LiDAR scan of the rocks.

I am experimenting with the cinematic and narrative possibilities of this technology to investigate a kind of new speculative strata the resulting imagery can reveal. Can it work, I wonder, as a bridge between us and that which surrounds and envelops us. The aspiration is to create a filmic experience where the human-non-human pairing becomes just one.

I wonder if the filmic experience allows us to speculate on modes of being in the world beyond traditional limits of human subjectivity.

This aspiration may give us a different sort of awareness, an ability “to pay more attention to nonhuman entities, even nonliving entities, and to consider how all these entities are not just tools we use, or impediments to our actions, but ‘actants,’” as the French sociologist Bruno Latour says. “They have their own tendencies, desires, and needs. At a time of impending ecological catastrophe, it is important for us to recognize as fully as possible the presence of the entities that share the

world with us.� Listening to the non-human is key in this project. With this intention in mind, I employ different audiovisual means to hear and see how this landscape reacts, and what feeds back.

AFTERWORD:

DOUBLE

NATURE

Back in the wild wild garden, a few months have gone by and summer has made its way to us. The wild strawberries have grown big and red but they are the non-edible kind; slugs and the various insects seemed to enjoy them, though. The ants have dug deeper and deeper, and there are now mini sand dunes on the ground. On the shadowy side of the garden, the ivy has created a tupid blanket that serves as a lair for ball bugs, snails, and other small critters. There are no flowers anymore but the foliage has expanded all over the place. The only limit to growth here is the neighboring gardens. Attracted by this lush environment, a few visitors come and go; pigeons that hide in the grass, flying insects of all stripes, and cats. The latter love the long grass that I assume no one else in the neighborhood allows to grow. So here they come in the morning, to roll on the micro sand dunes and eat the grass to clean their stomach. This is probably the wildest patch of land I’ve ever seen in the Netherlands.

Ecology is more or less about scale, about coming into terms with the spatial and temporal scales of beings other than ourselves.

And as the world is slowly returning to business as usual, I wonder what will get lost in the wild wild garden when no one is looking at it anymore. What chance do we have in our everyday life to pay attention to worlds and scales other than our own? Where should we look? Someone will say something like “Hey, let’s go to the park to spend some time in nature.” and someone else will reply, “Hey man, we are nature, we don’t need to go anywhere to experience it. Here’s some kombucha.” But who wants to be that person? I’ll stay in the garden for a little while longer instead, recording the “small” changes that happen in it.

Nature is a tricky word, one that separates us from the thing itself.17 It places the natural world far away from us. It’s a highly objective term, yet a ghostly one. It has a double nature. That’s why many authors think it may be time to give up on it. Let “nature” go and talk instead about the terrestrial, humans, the more-than-human, the wilderness, and the critical zone, etc. Something more grounded. Nature, the phenomena of the physical world, is framed by the word: NATURE, something distant and not found in our homes much less ourselves. In this framing may lie the true original sin, that of a cartographer who finds the map more interesting than the territory, or Edward Burke,

writing from his studio in Dublin about nature as the source of the sublime. That framing distance from which things are idealized. But when I film, I frame. How to escape that?

I tilt the camera downwards, towards the grass that grew from the little bits of soil collecting in the tiny gaps between the square, concrete tiles in the backyard patio. The mathematical grid of these tiles can’t contain the force of the vegetation growing underneath. The grass is overflowing its boundaries; it sways in the breeze and tips of individual blades touch the lens as if wanting to pierce it. Now the image overflows the sharp-angled video frame too, contaminating it, infecting it, rewilding it. It’s through an impure cinematic entanglement rather than romantic distance that the moving image turns into soil, substratum, which contains the possibility of new earthly narratives. It becomes a fertile, speculative terrain for critical stories that encourage a sense of possibility. Something we could perhaps call the cinema of ongoingness. Not a solution, just a possibility.

The wild wild garden. Photograph by Misho Antadze

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1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, (Princeton University Press, 2017) 2. Borbรกla Soรณs, Ecologies of the Ghost Landscape, Tranzit.sk, (2020) 3. Wikipedia, Trinity (nuclear test) 4. Wikipedia, Trinity (nuclear test) 5. Elizabeth M Deloughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019) 6. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Duke University Press, 2016) 7. The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse, (University of Minnesota Press, 2018, open access), 8. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, (University Of Minnesota Press, 2018) 10. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, (Zero Books, 2009) 11. Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian, #Accelerate (Urbanomic 2014) 12. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, (Princeton University Press, 2017) 13. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) 14. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) 15. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, (Princeton University Press, 2017) 16. Teerike Haapoja, Entropy, 1-channel video work, 2004 17. Emma Davie & Peter Mettler, Becoming Animal, 2018