by april forrest lin 林森
From the ancient to the incidental, the eight films in shorts programme A Zoo Must Never Be A Metaphor explore the rhythms, durations and architectures of impermanence.
In Void, Jacob Watkinson highlights the 16mm sprocket hole, bringing the perforation from periphery to centre, adapting mechanic function into symbolic focus. Driven by pulsating synth thrums, this reframing simultaneously invites an undoing towards nothingness and the building of a new structure. Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s here and not here meanders through a series of conversations on existing in an arrested state of waiting; of living meaningfully while under occupation. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and the Occupied Golan Heights between 2020 and 2023, these diaristic excerpts straddle the contemplative and the journalistic, locating themselves within relations.
Flowers for an Old Shrine by Long Pham looks to deterioration as a means of allowing an erasure of selfhood to form. Everyday observations crumble into scratches and blurs in this silent work where porosity prevails. In Matilda Butler’s Fathoms Deep, we witness the vibrant scarring caused by mining in the Cornish and West Devon landscapes. Attention is drawn to chemical processes: those which have left the land forever staining itself, and those which enable this filmic document of such stains to exist.
Jen Martin MacLean’s Ancient, Muted, Modern, Dress fashions a tartan, its colours and design a counter-representation gesturing to the tensions bubbling under the commodification of the Scottish Highlands. By inverting recognisable folk symbols to address the consequences of tourism and private property logics, palatability is rendered ominous as an antidote to manufactured ease. In The Shadows of the Jaguar, Ricardo del Conde concocts a ritual to honour and process his daughter’s surviving of soft tissue cancer. With a nod to each of the cardinal directions, an alchemical spell is cast, binding the maker of images and those who see them in a lasting encounter teeming with signs, symbols and forces.
In T4T, Avian de Keizer invites testosterone gel, skin flakes and lotion to collaborate on a recentring of embodiment from the purgatory of trans healthcare. The vessel of the film strip experiences a parallel treatment to that of the filmmaker’s own body, as both undergo transformation through intentional and consistent application of care. Madison Brookshire’s W 9th St, Brooklyn closes the programme in a moment of stillness at a busy New York traffic junction, its steadfast gaze filled with non-stop movement. As traffic passes through the fixed frame, we witness and participate in a meditative exercise invoking the age-old symbiotic tension between serenity and flux, set against the context of present-day urbanity.
