The Dominant Animal

About

For FIELDNOTES’ first film night at The Horse Hospital we present two very different films exploring the relationships between species viewed through the prisms of domination and desire. Both works connect violence, landscape and care; merging documentary and fictional modes to produce strange new intimacies. 

 This event takes its title from the book of the same name by Kathryn Scanlan. This unsettling short story collection exploring the inner lives of animals and humans is our recommended reading for the evening.

O Peixe [The fish] dir. Jonathas de Andrade

[16 mm transferred to HD, 23 minutes]

Located on the Northeast coast of Brazil, a village of fishermen enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. The affectionate embrace that accompanies the ritual marks a passage of death and a relationship between species that is imbued with an ambiguous sequence of gestures of tenderness, violence, and domination. The utopian dream of a harmonious community with its surroundings is a testament to the lack of connection between a man from the city and the nature that is at his service. Between fiction and reality, documentation and fantasy, the naturalness of domination hides the root of this relationship constituted by the constant exercise of strength, power and devotion.

SaF05 dir. Charlotte Prodger

[HD video, 39 minutes]

SaF05 is named after a maned lioness that figures in the work as a cipher for queer attachment and desire. This animal is the last of several maned lionesses documented in the Okavango Delta and is only known to Prodger through a database of behaviours and camera-trap footage logged across several years. These indexes of SaF05’s existence are intersected with autobiographical fragments from Prodger’s own life that fluctuate between proximity and distance. Her voiceover traces a chronology of intimate gestures and interpersonal connections from prepubescence to the present, inscribed with the incidental details of territorial delineation, sovereignty and land use. Central to these fluctuations is a tension between macro and micro, the experienced and the described.

 Jonathas de Andrade works with installation, photography, and video to explore constructs of love and the process of urbanization, with particular emphasis on Brazil’s vibrant but often ignored northeast region.

 Charlotte Prodger is a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image across the ever-evolving formats that are inextricably bound to the autobiographical content of her work. Previous works combine video taken from YouTube with spoken text taken from internet forums and personal emails. 

FIELDNOTES is an artist run publishing project that produces a biannual print journal and a public programme of workshops, radio broadcasts, screenings and readings. Founded in 2020, Fieldnotes aims to promote and support non-conforming creative practices that pioneer new cultural forms and collaborative ways of working.

www.fieldnotes.site