watch — moving sound/image

seeds of degrowth project

duration: variable by episode
format: single-screen film, installation and cinema performance

Without sampling, there is no soil. Without film stock, there's no reality.

This film is a proposal for a new cultural technique. We are going to use words sparingly, and put our confidence in an unstable image as two starting points. Combining tracing and sensing, we are exploring whether a radically different imaginary is possible. In seeds of degrowth, intelligence is understood as the dynamic genius of life forms as they are evolving. Life is restless and inarticulate. Its forms are un-doing, de-growing and returning to matter. The human is in waiting. They are witnessing, but they cannot speak this language of life. Our intelligence is nothing like emulsion's or soil's. All that we're capable of are cultural techniques. Sampling, exposing, gathering, layering, cultivating, voicing, spelling. Soil and film enable worlds that are unstable. Can the artist and the scientist accept instability?

Seeds of degrowth is a research-based art project, involving performance, experimental writing, cinema and soil microbiology. We are using a mode of operation that we call experimental ecopoetics. In this mode, the creation of a film is considered as a symbiotic act with the events around it. Photochemical film is used to search and research forms with soil, landscape, the microscopic, the haphazard and the intentional.

How could a degrowth process be activated through the oracle practice’s accumulated experience? What happens to camera images when we disperse them in a constellation of microbiological forces? How does the temporality of poetry, in its encounter with the vocal-spatial-durational strategies of the oracle practice affect a screen-work?

LT

rež. Miki Ambrózy | 2024 | 16 mm | 12 min.

„Seeds of Degrowth“ – tai performansą, eksperimentinį rašymą, kiną bei grunto mikrobiologiją apjungiantis ekopoetinis tyrimas. Fotojuosta čia tampa įrankiu skirtingas forms tyrinėti naudojant žemę, peizažą, mikropasaulį bei tai, kas juose nutinka (ne)tyčia.

seeds of degrowth (#1)
March 2024, Brussels, Belgium. nadine - contemporary laboratory for contemporary arts.

seeds of degrowth (#2)
June 2024, Vilnius, Lithuania care of ... Future Casting. Vilnius Photography Gallery

A Field Holding Ithaka - live
July 2024, Nida, Lithuania
(episode 003 of seeds of degrowth)

A Field Holding Ithaka - the film
August 2024, Vilnius, Lithuania
(episode 004 of seeds of degrowth)

Artists: Caroline Daish, Miklós Ambrózy - with Nojus Drasutis, Sophie Durand, Ruta Vizbaraite and Rasa Janciauskaite, the oracle (Caroline Daish and Justine Maxelon)

Research: microbiology dr. Dovilė Vasiliauskienė

Media: voices, ambient sound, digital screens, 16mm film transferred to digital, agar-based growth media, aspergillus fumigatus, rhizopus, 16mm film frame

episode 004 - A Field Holding Ithaka

12’ | EN | single-screen | 16mm and video | sound
Vilnius, Lithuania, 2024 August 22

Event hosted by Meno Avylis, curated by Bon Alog (SPONGE Lab).

episode 003 - A Field Holding Ithaka

21’ | EN | 16mm and video, optical sound, live performance by the oracle
Nida, Lithuania, 2024 July 31

>> ︎ Listen to the oracle ︎ <<

episode 002 - seeds of degrowth

9’ | EN | 16mm transfer and video | installation
Vilnius, Lithuania, 2024 June 15-21

Part of Future Casting. An event by care_of (Sophie Durand and Adomas Žudys).