The film maps a landscape inhabited and traversed by other species, over the course of one day, January first, the first day of the year, as an elegy to time, space and the ambiguity of being.
54 species on an island, on the first day of the year is an audiovisual taxonomy of a seasonal landscape, and the ritual of amassing bird sightings into blank notebooks. A ritual which in the immediate is driven by the desire for accumulation of observations as data on a blank slate, but which in the bleak Scandinavian winter landscape functions as a mode for honoring the natural world through all its costume changes, and the ability to sense it and oneself anew as part of the tradition of rekindling body and mind through the observation of other species in shared space.
54 species on an island, on the first day of the year, is the sixth stanza of eight within the lager body of work, Man from Iota.
Man from Iota
As a body of work, Man from Iota investigates the correspondence of time and the instance of man’s existence in it, the desire for the unattainable freedom of flight within this instance, while being tethered to the rock of time and history, his own doing within it and his desire for quantifiable knowledge about something other within nature.
– Between the roar and the rock
– Passerine in Time
– Declination in Time
– Declination of Passerine
– Beyond the farthest plane
– 54 species on an island, on the first day of the year
– Monolithography
– Epilogue “TSA”
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