Wasserspiegel – Water Bodies
Interspecies Conviviality
Film screening and conversation with the filmmakers
5. June 2025
19.30-22.00
19.30-22.00
Save the Date
For free
all ages welcome
in English/in French
Immersed in different ecosystems, the films in this program attempt to relate to and to become with the more-than-human, looking at other species as potential allies. Following a salmon with Indigenous communities in the Snake River Basin, in Turtle Island, learning from peasants and nonhuman symbiotic collaborations in Japan, or working collectively in the Cévennes forest, reenacting different temporalities and feminist-she boar alliances, what is at stake is interspecies reciprocity and conviviality.
Reciprocal Sacrifice
(Carolina Caycedo, USA, 2022, 12 min, Original version with English subtitles)
Caycedo’s film, Reciprocal Sacrifice, takes viewers on the journey of a salmon seeking to return to its spawning grounds in the Sawtooth Mountains. The salmon narrates the challenges it faces as it swims upstream and tells of the heating of the water in the lakes, creeks and rivers in the Snake River Basin. With voiceovers by members of the Nez Perce Tribe, viewers learn of the salmon’s generosity in sustaining people and ecosystems over generations.
Shape Shifting
(Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov, Japan, 2018, 18 min, Original version with English subtitles)
Granting culture to nonhumans the film “Shape Shifting” outlines an affective cartography of a landscape found in many parts of Asia, and in Japan is called satoyama – a passage between village and mountain. Created by exchanges and encounters between humans and nonhumans its biodiversity is based on the increase of symbiotic interactions and collaborations. The more collaborations between species and cycles of materials are created—the more stable ecosystem can be formed.
Les Sanglières / She Boars
(Elsa Brès, France, 2025, 69 min)
In the 16th century, in a Cévennes forest, peasant women banded together to fight against the abolition of communal lands. A few centuries later, the privatized forest is under the watchful eye of Annie, a solitary 75-year-old janitor. As an anomaly intrudes on Annie's secure territory, one night the landscape turns upside down. The artist investigates the figure of the boar as a potential ally in the anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist struggle.
This event is part of the film series The Land is Whispering: Imagine Otherwise!. You can find the whole program here: The Land is Whispering - Program.
