by april forrest lin 林森
Amidst shrubs and marshlands, gardens and rivers, the five films in shorts programme The Dreams Of Fishes confront life and longing, existence and desire.
In Deborah S Philips and Zuzanna Marzcak’s DETRITUS, artists from two different generations declare an intention to notice beauty in the rubbish around them. As the filmmakers point their cameras down, crumpled, half-buried treasures-to-be make themselves known to us in all their discarded, textural glory. Rivulets of 16mm film strip trail through the flotsam topography accompanied by earthly rumbles and household crinkles, as tectonic shifts in perception stir afoot. Sophie Sherman and Némo Camus’s the water was here traces the incidental ecosystem of Brussels’ Wiels Marsh, birthed by the accidental puncturing of the local water table. Amongst the concrete ruins, an alliance of multispecies inhabitants is and has been collectively rewilding these spoils of a former real estate venture. In a collaboration centring sound and image, the film introduces this wetland heterotopia and the post-capitalist possibilities it plays host to, as the spectre of private property looms over the horizon.
Jessie Growden’s Bodies in Water submerges us in an aquatic contemplation that seeps through a summer of distanced yearning to ponder the migratory pathways of salmon, embodied experiments in wild swimming, and anthropocenic considerations of entanglement with the local fish. On the River Tweed, we flow through the filmmaker’s collectively narrated diaristic fragments, its fluvial structure guiding us as we gaze out from underwater into the air above, learning to see through refractions and ripples. As we float, there is no longer solid ground beneath our feet. Suffused by the wet, a process of re-orientation is set in motion, leaking and dribbling long after the film’s conclusion.
YTORORÕ, or Mouth of the Muddy Stream by Owa Barua takes us through murky, chlorophyllic environs by way of a trickling and throbbing soundscape, extending an invitation to deep listening through its sonic brew of field recordings and modular synth. Loosely inspired by Paraguayan mythology and the acoustic landscapes of Aberfoyle, the film slowly constructs a kind of after-image, which continuously impresses itself against, across, and within shadows, self-reflexively upending the expectation of transparency. Closing the programme, Elisa González’s Seeds centres on a conversation between the filmmaker and her child about death: what it means, what actually happens, if you remember it afterwards. Phytogram phantoms flit across shadowy smears, light blistering through the frame as beginnings for life are tucked into the soil by gentle fingertips. As winds howl and leaves crackle, energy transmutes, never staying still – a certain lack of certainty mirroring how some questions can only be answered by not knowing.
