Issue

Letters from the Field

April 2018

Two weeks ago the sun crossed the celestial equator from southern to northern hemisphere. For those in the north, this means days longer than nights, warmer temperatures, deeper thaw, migrations, fresh growth -- all those signifiers collected under the word "spring". At Labocine, we too turn towards the shifting seasons and head outdoors. It's time to get out of the lab, a time to launch new field projects and investigate the natural world. Across forest, jungle, or tundra, plunging into biomes and observing agricultural issues. For those south of the equator, flip all of those signs: fall is upon us but we can still look back over the growing seasons of the last six months. Either way, this is chance to check in with all of those lifeforms living among and besides us across the globe.

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Hope Island

FILM Canada 2015
Charles Lindsay

Ctenophora / Comb Jellies are the oceanic species that recently initiated a radical re-drawing of the Tree of Life - from the bottom up. This video was captured during a full moon upwelling at Hope Island, British Columbia - as raw material for installations that consider alternate evolutionary path

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Territory (2014)

FILM United Kingdom 2014
Eleanor Mortimer

The rock of Gibraltar is shared between two primate species: people and monkeys. The monkeys populated the upper rock long before the latest human inhabitants, the British, arrived, and now, 300 years on, there are tensions between the two. Attempts to expel the monkeys from the town with peashooter

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Stella 50.4N1.5E

FILM France 2016
Elsa Brès

Facing a sea of dunes, hands are putting together a heap of documents – maps, samples, 3D scans of landscape, thermographies. They elaborate a manifold, experimental and invading cartography of a moving landscape. This manipulation work erects Stella -an unpopulated seaside resort- as a milieu

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The Shaman and the Scientist

FILM United States 2017
Sarah Hutt

This short documentary explores the topic of traditional plant medicine from two perspectives - that of Don Juan Tangoa Paima, a curandero who works with Ayahuasca medicine in the Peruvian Amazon and through the research of Dr. Dennis McKenna, an American Ethnobotanist looking for new plant compound

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The Orchard Keepers

FILM Egypt 2014
Bryony Dunne

Against the backdrop of political upheaval, an ancient network of orchards thrives in the mountains of the Sinai desert. Filmmaker Bryony Dunne shadows two Bedouins as they nurture their gardens and are nurtured by them. This poetic portrait of symbiosis digs deep into the perceptual complexities be

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Leafcutters

FILM United States 2017
Catherine Chalmers

"Leafcutters" is an unusual collaboration with millions of wild ants. Focusing on four supposedly unique human traits - language, ritual, war and art – the narrative aims to blur the boundaries between culture and nature.

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A Commons Sense

FILM India 2015
Chintan Gohil

biopiracy |ˌbʌɪəʊˈpʌɪrəsi| noun [ mass noun ] the practice of commercially exploiting naturally occurring biochemical or genetic material, especially by obtaining patents that restrict its future use, while failing to pay fair compensation to the community from which it originates. The US patent act

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Biosemiotic Borneo

FILM Switzerland, Borneo 2016
Ursula Biemann

Biosemiotic Borneo – a more explicitly sonic than visual piece of art – lingers around a giant Banyan tree that stands in the Meratus Mountains in Southeast Borneo. Drawing attention to the semiotic processes of world-making in nature, the audio-visual work explores how artists and

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Shape Shifting

FILM Germany, Japan 2014
Elke Marhöfer Mikhail Lylov

Granting culture to nonhumans, Shape Shifting outlines a cartography of a landscape found in many parts of Asia, which in Japan is called satoyama—space between village and mountain. Satoyama signifies the diffusions between 'wild' and 'designed' and can be understood as a membrane arranged th

The Shark in the Park

FILM Germany 2016
Polynoid

The Shark in the Park visualizes the growth and development process of a special strawberry species called "Parco Pistris" which has been discovered by a Korean scientifical research group KSPRI in 2016. KSPRI commissioned animation-director-collective Polynoid to take their research and create a vi

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Milieu

FILM France 2015
Damien Faure

Mr Nishida is an entomologist. He has a close bond to the natural environment. On a scientific expedition to the island of Yakushima, an island of mountains shrouded in a seemingly eternal mist, he serves as our ferryman for discovering the spiritual beliefs that accompany the relationship that the

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Below 0°

FILM Costa Rica 2017
Itai Hagage Jonathan Gomez

A meteorologist who narrates his experience in the Arctic through a voice recording; And how his life is linked physically and spiritually to nature. Below 0 ° is an animated short film that uses fictional documentary as its main narrative resource. The main theme concerns the life of Vladimir K

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Sowing the Seeds of Change

FILM United Kingdom 2014
Doreen Edemafaka

Desertification in Kenya resulting from unsustainable development and use of trees for firewood, has caused substantial environmental damage such as Drought, land erosion, dried up river bed due to insufficient amount of rain and lose of wildlife and birds; Social damage such as families going hungr

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Coronation Park

FILM Canada 2015
Su Rynard

Coronation Park is constructed from shots of bare maple and oak trees in winter. The images are paired with the single word breathe. Inspired by the many languages spoken in the city of Toronto where the film was shot, the words rhythmically appear then disappear, each time in a different language.

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The Loneliest

FILM USA 2014
Lilian Mehrel

Go 'behind-the-scenes' of British nature show Ocean Discovery in this tragicomic mockumentary: Violet (a camera-girl with a wry sense of humor) and Ingrid (a marine biologist with a singular passion for whales) go looking for the loneliest whale in the world (with a voice too high for the others to

How to Found an Ant Colony

FILM USA 2015
Danielle Parsons

Every spring, established ant colonies exile their royalty – small populations of reproductive female and male ants. These winged layabouts suddenly spring into action, flying up into the air to enter clouds of mating ants, called leks. They mate for the first and last time with ants from neig

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White Planet

FILM Italy 2014
Francesco Mattuzzi

White Planet represents the border between dream and reality. It is a planet with a milky atmosphere, where the ground emanates light and on which the earth's spatial-temporal rules, feelings and perceptions are altered. The planet is a wrinkled giant animating overflow, eating and disorienting the

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Washingtonia

FILM Greece 2014
Konstantina Kotzamani

The giraffe is the animal with the biggest heart. The distance between its head and its heart is three meters, so the heart is big enough to send the blood all the way up. When the giraffe is lying down, its heartbeat touches the ground-it goes underground. All animals are tuned to the heartbeat of