Transducing a single film into printed matter, this book addresses the question of how to connect the nonhumans, animals and plants to the postcolonial space without deepening inflicted violations on both people and nature? The film prendas – ngangas – enquisos – machines {each part welcomes the other without saying} gathers affects of plants and animals whose ancestors were moved to the new world, and ‘had to colonize the new land with the humans as a team.’ in present-day Cuba animals such as cows, horses, goats, pigs and chickens provide food and labor, and often move around freely. Much like extended family members some animals share close relations with humans. Some entered the intermediate state between domesticated and wild, others return to the forest to fully reverse their domestication and to become something else entirely.
Tag: animals
No, I Am Not a Toad, I Am a Turtle
The publication No, I Am Not a Toad, I Am a Turtle goes back to a three year long research and a film project by Elke Marhöfer on the Korean song form of ‘pansori’ music. Confronted with an animist ontology, growing from the research, the publication revisits discredited philosophies based upon believes on souls and spirits, and questions how modernity designed and conceptualized the relationships and boundaries between ‘humans,’ ‘animals,’ ‘plants’ and ‘things.’
Nobody Knows, When it Was Made and Why
The publication takes a fresh look at Aby Warburg’s prominent Mnemosyne Atlas. Reflecting on the fact that research, be it art or science based, is a historical and anthropological procedure that is closely related to colonialism, the film and the two essays rethink how Warburg creates a relational and trans-cultural methodology. Inhuman and animating forces of images, things, animals, people, minerals, amulets and dices, solar and lunar eclipses, intestines, magic stones and starry heavens stemming from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Jordan suggest exploring Mnemosyne Atlas outside of European cultural history and the imagination of itself.