Christoph Brunner

Territories of Transvaluation

2015

Left in the audible dark, listening to the crackling sound of forest, slowly coming to the phase of existence that is vision, following earthy grounds constituting a landscape of the informe — a beyond form. The film Shape Shifting composes a territory imbued with activity. The 16 mm film activates a specific sensation of color, sound and movement of different territories and different scales. Over almost 20 minutes the images give a poetic, slow and heterogeneous account of a particular Japanese landscape, satoyama, and the way it activates human and more-than-human engagements. […] In resonance with Shape Shifting the question of the territory extends its scope beyond a reduced natural ecology in relation to human appropriation towards an utterly inhumane dimension, which one might call aesthetic. Aesthetic as a realm of the inhumane defines the very field of relations composing the way a territory holds together without being finitely bound. [continue reading]

Thanks to Hiroyuki Yoshioka, Katsue Fukamachi, Ayumi Ogino, Tomoyo Adachi, Sninichi Mori, Satoshi Asakura, Kent Hadlock, Naoki Shiomi, Kazuma Higashida, Mamoru Daido, Shinichi Aoki, Susumu Nakanishi, and Horie Ryohei.

Additional support by Pavillon Neuflize OBC, Palais De Tokyo and the University of Gothenburg, Akademin Valand.

For public or institutional screenings, please contact Arsenal Distribution Berlin