This new VWFF program explores the intersection of speculative ecology and feminist science fiction, imagining futures where the human coexists with the technological, the geological, and the more-than-living. Through speculative fiction, experimental film, and expanded documentary, Speculative Ecologies charts new maps of the posthuman environment, challenging dominant structures of perception and power.

From non-anthropocentric narratives to the visualization of invisible systems, these works invite us to speculate on alternative ways of inhabiting the ecological and material transformation of our time. It is a space to imagine other futures, where the human is no longer the sole axis of meaning. – Barbara Bielitz, curator

APOCALYPTIC

by Carolina Boettner – Argentina/Germany

A plague invades the world. This forces the inhabitants to emigrate somewhere. The plague affects the vision of the people, leaving them blind. The world is in “de-construction,” and a new one must be created in some other space.

ARDEIDAE

by Chiara Faggionato, Daniele Tucci & Corrado Chiatti – Italy

A group of tourists arrives at the lagoon of an imaginary Venice during an unspecified time period and embarks on a journey into the interior of the city, guided by an audio guide.
The audio guide’s description of Venice clashes with the ruined scenery of a city that may disappear in a few decades, swallowed by the seas.

TWENTY ONE PERCENT

by Ursula Biemann & Mo Diener – Switzerland

In this small formation history of atmospheric chemistry, flying and thinking beings emerge as the result of high levels of oxygen in the air which is owed to earth’s forest and plant cover. In the midst of the oxygenic forest, a science-fictional performer manipulates a multitude of ingredients–minerals, forest fruits, liquids and substances–some of which are recognized as potential human foods, others not. Ranging in scale from the cosmos to the kitchen, the video undertakes an empirical inquiry into the capacity of chemical elements.

MetaNature: A SPACE IN-BETWEEN

by Julia Shu(tkevych) – Ukraine

An audiovisual meditation on the evolving entanglement of life and non-life. It unfolds a dynamic symbiosis between slime mould and the discarded technology, inviting to explore the unheard narratives of the space in between. Through bioacoustics in the landscape of interspecies communication, the film amplifies unheard interspecies voices, revealing liminal spaces between the living and non-living, decay and renewal, akin to the dynamic wrack line between Land and Sea.

ARRULLO

by Amauta García & David Camargo – Netherlands

Arrullo is a song to Zuidwal, an underwater volcano in the Wadden Sea, which they say is dead. It has been exploited for the natural gas above its crater and remains unknown. We created a story to lull her.

PSYCHOTERRA

by Emily Pelstring & Naomi Okabe – Canada

Two scientists from the Technomystic Ecology Lab develop technology that processes the ecological grief contained within a database of audio testimonials. In their lab, located deep inside a cave, they alchemize these feelings into a seed archive for an unknown future.

OBSERVATORY OF THE SUBMERGED

by Rox Vazquez – Argentina/Germany

In this speculative visual record, floating organisms seem to emit light in response to hidden presences beneath the water. Between fiction and field observation, the work proposes a blurred territory where the submerged is revealed only through imagination.

TACHI

by Lisa Schonberg – Brazil/ US

Tachi was made in tropical rain forest at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) in Amazonas State, Brazil.
Myrmecologist Phil Ward, who specializes in the ant genus Pseudomyrmex, told me about the incredible obligate relationship between the symbionts featured in the film: ants of the species Pseudomyrmex concolor and the plant Tachigali myrmecophila.

PLANET Z

by Momoko Seto – France/Japan

Somewhere in the Universe, the PLANET Z. A miracle happens. A water jet springs up and gives birth to a new life: plants. A desert planet became a green planet… Different species cohabit: liquid and sticky mushrooms. But little by little, they invade the green land, and destroy the idyllic life. The toxic spores kill the plants, and transform the planet to a mouldy land… But after destroying all the vegetation, the future of the mould seems to be fearsome. A species cannot live without other ones…