While looking for collaborative and situated practices that would allow me to explore our embodied knowledge of nonhuman living beings, I set up an experimental film and sound workshop with the residents of Maarja küla in Estonia, a supported living facility for neurodivergent adults.

Learning to notice modes of being alive beyond the symbolic realm requires invention of procedures of enquiry that mobilise imagination and deploy distinct perceptual sensitivities. I think of our singular ways of experiencing the world, united in the shared artistic process, as ways of coming to knowledge. The participants’ taste in repetition, burlesque and noise, the variations of attention and temporality that score our explorations, the importance of traces, indexicality, touch and friction make up the position from which we learn together about nonhuman living beings. 

How to account for different modes of producing knowledge from those based on symbolic meaning and abstraction? How to train our attention to read non-symbolic signs? What art practices attend to the complexity and uniqueness of animal ways of being alive, without referring to cultural symbols?

Our shared artistic practices include Foley – recording sound effects for existing moving images – using everyday objects and our bodies, allowing us to re-materialise found footage and perform impossible encounters. We either perform sounds that correspond to the sensory memory of a particular species, or let our bodies and objects lead the sound explorations, without the aim of imitation. Emitting sounds mobilises the entire body and its kinaesthetic potential so that we become the animal or insect on the screen.

The videos proposed for “Field/Works II: Generating Ecologies of Trust” are excerpts of our work-in-progress. Our most recent explorations include work on two species threatened with extinction in Estonia: the black stork (Ciconia Nigra) and the freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera Margaritifera).

The video is an example of our Foley practice, where we make new soundtracks for existing video and movie excerpts. During the sound recording sessions, we first watch the excerpts without sound, then try to perform sounds that the images evoke. We explore the sounds of everyday objects by rubbing them, banging them together, dropping them on sugar, sand or water, whistling through apertures. We try out different textures of moss, tree branches and bark. While performing vocalisations, we test the sonic capacities of our bodies. In this excerpt, we entirely re-created the audio layer of the video recorded in the nest of a pair of black storks.

The videos were streamed online from the nest located in the Karula National Park in Estonia by Kotkaklubi, an Estonian wildlife association.

Maarja küla is a place where people live, learn and work together, situated in the middle of an Estonian forest. We have 6 family houses, a village centre, craft workshops, a garden, a maze, and an art exhibition in the forest.  As a film group, we record sounds both indoors and outdoors in the woods; we listen to them together and edit them. Currently we are working on a science-fiction film set in the village.

While looking for collaborative and situated practices that would allow me to explore our embodied knowledge of nonhuman living beings, I set up an experimental film and sound workshop with the residents of Maarja küla in Estonia, a supported living facility for neurodivergent adults.

Learning to notice modes of being alive beyond the symbolic realm requires invention of procedures of enquiry that mobilise imagination and deploy distinct perceptual sensitivities. I think of our singular ways of experiencing the world, united in the shared artistic process, as ways of coming to knowledge. The participants’ taste in repetition, burlesque and noise, the variations of attention and temporality that score our explorations, the importance of traces, indexicality, touch and friction make up the position from which we learn together about nonhuman living beings. 

How to account for different modes of producing knowledge from those based on symbolic meaning and abstraction? How to train our attention to read non-symbolic signs? What art practices attend to the complexity and uniqueness of animal ways of being alive, without referring to cultural symbols?

Our shared artistic practices include Foley – recording sound effects for existing moving images – using everyday objects and our bodies, allowing us to re-materialise found footage and perform impossible encounters. We either perform sounds that correspond to the sensory memory of a particular species, or let our bodies and objects lead the sound explorations, without the aim of imitation. Emitting sounds mobilises the entire body and its kinaesthetic potential so that we become the animal or insect on the screen.

The videos proposed for “Field/Works II: Generating Ecologies of Trust” are excerpts of our work-in-progress. Our most recent explorations include work on two species threatened with extinction in Estonia: the black stork (Ciconia Nigra) and the freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera Margaritifera).

The video is an example of our Foley practice, where we make new soundtracks for existing video and movie excerpts. During the sound recording sessions, we first watch the excerpts without sound, then try to perform sounds that the images evoke. We explore the sounds of everyday objects by rubbing them, banging them together, dropping them on sugar, sand or water, whistling through apertures. We try out different textures of moss, tree branches and bark. While performing vocalisations, we test the sonic capacities of our bodies. In this excerpt, we entirely re-created the audio layer of the video recorded in the nest of a pair of black storks.

The videos were streamed online from the nest located in the Karula National Park in Estonia by Kotkaklubi, an Estonian wildlife association.

The video includes our experimentations with an underwater camera as way of exploring the freshwater pearl mussels’ immersion in water in its different stages of life: as a larva attached to the gills of the salmonid, and as a juvenile mussel buried in the sand and capable of slowing down its life processes in unfavourable environmental conditions. We have also tried to perform water filtering, a crucial aspect of the mussel’s existence. The last chapter of the video, on the shell as a living memory of the mussel's ecosystem, includes our first experimentations with hydrophones designed and manufactured by sound artist Jez Riley French.

This work neither shows the freshwater pearl mussels, nor was filmed in their usual habitat, as it is an endangered species.

Maarja küla is a place where people live, learn and work together, situated in the middle of an Estonian forest. We have 6 family houses, a village centre, craft workshops, a garden, a maze, and an art exhibition in the forest.  As a film group, we record sounds both indoors and outdoors in the woods; we listen to them together and edit them. Currently we are working on a science-fiction film set in the village.