We are living in an age when the boundaries of the human body seem to be dissolving. The high concentrations of nanoplastics found in the human brain — a byproduct of extreme levels of pollution — pose a challenge: to rethink what boundaries mean, and to see in porosity an opportunity to “stay with the trouble.”

Porosities starts from there — from the conviction that the boundaries separating the living from the inert, the organic from the technological, the individual from their environment, are primarily cultural constructs. Constructs that made it possible to decide what could be exploited and what deserved care. Yet moving beyond these constructs allows us to see that these boundaries are permeable, that they blur and transmute.

This edition of Speculative Ecologies seeks works that think from within that permeability — not as a threat, but as a condition from which to imagine other ways of living together. Short films that ask what happens at the edges: between interspecies relationships, between bodies in transformation, between technologies that permeate. Works that take the agency of the non-human seriously without using it as a mirror for the human — and that recognize that at those edges, care is neither one-sided nor sentimental, but an obligation that circulates asymmetrically and materially through soils, fungi, data, and bodies. The waste of some as sustenance for others. The kinships no one chose, and that nonetheless endure and hold us together.

Porosities seeks completed short films of up to 20 minutes that propose other ecologies — from eco-fiction, solarpunk, cli-fi, and cyberpunk to classic sci-fi, docufiction, and animation, and everything that inhabits the spaces between and across these genres. The call is international and open to all geographies and languages. English subtitles are required.