Porosities
Speculative Ecologies – Porosities is an invitation to
speculate about life and companionship in possible worlds.
Curated by Bárbara Bielitz (@laecha)
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.
SHORT FILMS
Diatomatica II FC
USA, 1:55 min, director: Kayla Jean Smith
Diatomatica II is an experimental video piece composed of iPhone field recordings filmed along the Elbe riverbank. The data from the MP4 files is corrupted by increasing the aspect ratio in the editing software, stretching the pixels of the original videos. This simulates what it may look like for beings in the future to retrieve lost or corrupted data left behind by today’s devices. The video follows a xenofictional narrative, in which digital E-waste has been consumed by tiny microalgae, causing them to emerge from the river and form a technosexual relationship with the surrounding plant life. The concept imagines a future where a non-human organic intelligence may interact with algorithms and form a fruitful symbiotic relationship, enabling nature and pleasure to coexist with technology.
TR333
UK, 10:00 min, director: april forrest lin 林森
In collaboration with ecologist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, artist-filmmaker april forrest lin 林森 presents ‘TR333’, a speculative documentary which imagines a new species of tree based on scientific literature on plants and climate hardiness.
Their hybrid forms and body parts a patchwork amalgamation of different tree types, this tree is a climate adaptative response, a lifeform born out of resilience and hope.
Elegy for the Upcoming Apocalypse
Thailand, 3:51 min, director: Blue Naga
Elegy for the Upcoming Apocalypse imagines a future in which humanity has abandoned Earth and established colonies elsewhere among the stars. Written from the perspective of a stranded astronaut, the video follows a traveler who crash-lands on the long-lost blue planet only to discover that their body has become alien to the world from which their species once emerged.
Critically | Almost Disappeared | Disappeared
Spain, 5:55 min, director: Ceci Prandini
The code alters the shape, texture, and continuity of the images.
Climate change irreversibly alters the natural structures of glaciers.
Digital deformation becomes a reflection of the melting, retreat, and disappearance of glaciers.
Mono/Stereo/UHD/2025
Audiovisual recording carried out on the glaciers of Patagonia (Argentina).
Tissue
(The Stage of your Skin)
Finland, 10:39 min, director: Henna-Riikka Halonen
Tissue (The Stage of your Skin) counters speculatively the optimized representations of the body and the demand for a high performance of living and non-living entities.
Caves of Our Insides
Latvia, 6 min, director: Sabīne Šnē
Caves of Our Insides explores our connections to the Earth, tracing how iron links human bodies to planet’s core. It reflects on iron’s dual role as both a life-giver, essential to blood and breath, and a force of destruction, forged into weapons that disrupt various forms of beings.
Memories For An Unstable Future
France, 4:39 min, director: Sandrine Deumier
Memories for an unstable future is a journey through landscapes, neither natural nor artificial in which the material of the landscape is the constitutive element of a new human existence. The video evokes the possibility of imagining non-invasive ways of living that could steer the present towards viable near-futures, where living would mean sharing the world-with.
Becoming Bodily
Portugal, 6:40 min, director: Sancha
Exploring the transcendent experience of the birth of a new being, the film invites viewers into the non-human world of the Fems: an ambiguous cybernetic realm that rethinks human ways of life. Through a queer visual narrative, the work engages with a fundamental question: how does one deal with existence?
With having a body, thoughts, feelings…
The Fallen Clouds
Chile, 16:52 min, director: Josefina Buschmann Mardones
An AI chatbot wonders about their digital memory while they talk to a submarine cable, follow a protest against a new data center, and hear the tears of a volcano in cell phone batteries.
