III. Otherground
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the concept of ‘nature’ (as traditionally defined) contains ‘the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.’ This strand poses a visual challenge to such a construct, exploring how fashion and nature intertwine within imaginative worlds conjured by the moving image in its varying materialities. Metamorphoses, fantasy, camouflage, and digital shapeshifting dissolve perceived boundaries between human bodies and ecological systems.
LondonA programme of archival gems exploring the delicate and gloriously perverse associations between women, flowers and insects as envisioned by early 20th century filmmakers.
LondonThis rarely-screened film starring the iconic model Veruschka von Lehndorff is a lush existentialist portrayal of personhood and a contemplation of beauty as raw material.
BristolFollowing Daisies, Fruit of Paradise marks another acclaimed collaboration between director Věra Chytilová, costume designer Ester Krumbachová, and cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera. As highly stylised as its predecessor, the film reimagines the biblical Fall of Man as an allegory for Czechoslovakia’s loss of freedom after the Soviet invasion in 1968.
Inverness | GlasgowJodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre is a collage fashioned from some 85,000 meticulously crafted frames captured across six continents. In them, Mack unfolds a unique cosmology centred on textiles as entities that are alert to the ceaseless motion of their surroundings.
GlasgowThis programme of digital shorts explores nonhuman or hybrid states – whether through flora and fauna, mythic creatures or surreal transformations – to frame and examine identity, ecology, society, and the boundaries between self and other.
Under Snow (Unter Schnee)
LondonIn this irresistible blend of ethnography and poetry, artist Ulrike Ottinger meditates on the lives of those who live in Japan’s Echigo region where the snow often lies several feet deep well into May.
Donkey Skin (Peau d’Âne)
London | Plymouth A fantastical slant on the weight of wearing fur, examining the transformative effects of what we wear, and how our proximity to animality can liberate us from the restrictions of conventional fashions.
LondonOperating at the edges of reality and fantasy, serenity and grotesqueness, this programme harnesses animation as a language through which to express complex ideas about the relationships between bodies, objects and environments.