Despite the ingeniously bogus stories of dolphins taking over Venice’s “clean” canals and our temporary re-attunement with the sounds of the more-than-human in silent quarantined cities, we are still rapidly driving towards ecological collapse and mass extinction, with a shared sense of apathy. Are we perhaps entering an eco-hangover or eco-frustration, driven by the restrictions of the temporal and spatial logic of Western society, not to mention its corporate green-washing? How do we start to really care and act in solidarity, escaping the capitalist death race?
As Timothy Morton puts it, in their book Humankind (2017), to encounter an ecological entity is to be haunted. This strand seeks an assembly of spectral ecologies which depart from the idea of linear temporality and generate a different type of “awakeness”.
Making homage to Donna Haraway’s fables “with wild facts, facts that run free and can’t stay still”, Eco Spectrality’s first programme Residual Fabulations reunites ghostly presences of the past with the implausible but real now. The films reunite us with mythical critters, such as the entity Curupira, protectress of Brazil’s forests, followed by an incarnated ghost of a 14-year-old prostitute along the Phantom Road in Curupira and the machine of destiny, the rock spirits of the Azores threatening its population with another eruption in Spirits and Rocks: an Azorean Myth and the mysterious creatures of the bog becoming the builders of the future in CASTOROCENE’s absurdist tale. The programme also unearths other stories and myths woven deep in our collective subconscious with Pneuma looking into forms or spirituality that are unfaithful to life and Salty Oscillations investigating the influence of terrestrial and subterranean landscapes on the imagination.
The second programme Tentacular Frequencies shifts the human focus to the shared and sometimes ruined landscapes of humans and more-than-humans, opening up a door to inhabit the spatial, temporal and spiritual realms alien to human sensibility. The programme includes an animistic and eclectic portrait of an Indonesian mountain groaning about its colonial history (Tellurian Drama), an introduction to the moles’ vibratory world in communion with a mole catcher (Earth Swimmers) a love ritual between trees led by children deep into the Mayan forest (Yollotl) and a tapestry of acoustic ecology (For the Animals).
Ane Lopez
A+E Collective
Eco-spectrality: Residual Fabulations is screening at 18:45 on Fri 25 March at Civic House.
Eco-spectrality: Tentacular Frequencies is screening at 14:00 on Sun 27 March at Civic House.