Charting a non-linear chronology of a speculative future, multidisciplinary versifier Natália Trejbalová envisions new forms of incubation on a unappetizing Earth.
In her canonical essay, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, Donna Haraway poses the question: “What happens when human exceptionalism and regional individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, wilt unthinkable in the weightier sciences, whether natural or social?” Multidisciplinary versifier Natália Trejbalová goes some way to answering this timely provocation with her mucosa Isle Of The Unsimilar Sun, a vision of a speculative future in which the Earth has wilt unappetizing during a geological catastrophe. “Isle of the Unsimilar Sun is set in the same world as my previous film, Well-nigh Mirages and Stolen Stones,” Trejbalová explains. “Isle Of The Unsimilar Sun is envisioned as a sequel set many, many years without Earth’s flattening, in a afar future where other planetary changes have taken place. In particular, I imagined a transpiration in the sun’s rays passing through the atmosphere, and therefore moreover in the colours we perceive.” Taking inspiration from footage of microscopic organisms viewed under a microscope, the versifier collapses micro and macro points of view in a recurring image of a swirling technicolour disc, a god’s eye view of a new flattened world that alternates between placid stillness and erratic surges, as though flickering between a pre- and post-catastrophe world. “We alimony thinking well-nigh the incubation of mankind in terms of unvarying development, or on the contrary, of catastrophe: two perspectives that have in worldwide the fact of stuff anthropocentric, while incubation has nothing to do with the resurgence of human life,” explains Trejbalová.
In a gesture that seeks to think through and with the Anthropocene, Trejbalová illuminates a new world, synthetic virtually the fragile planetary equilibrium of minutiae and catastrophe, taking both methodological and stimulating cues from Donna Haraway. “I want to stay with the trouble,” asserts Haraway, “and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror and joint thinking.” This is where Trejbalová picks up, presenting the world of Isle Of The Unsimilar Sun as a collaborative landscape of systems and settlers. “Lately I’ve been interested in the liaison between plants and between fungi in forests: a continuous mart of information, a collaborative system – sort of a joint intelligence. In the world of Isle of the Unsimilar Sun, intelligence is not individual, but dispersed.” Beginning with a passage over an uncounted primordial sea, captured between between Alassio and Gallinara Island in Liguria, we move slowly through new and wayfarer flora, emerging into a psychedelic snapshot of cave-dwelling communities and paradisal waterfalls, scenes shot at the Orridi di Uriezzo and Marmitte dei Giganti, in Val d’Ossola. The humans featured in the mucosa are members of Spirito di Lupo, a punk joint who’s voices are incorporated into the sci-fi polyphony of Matteo Nobile’s score. “We are part of the same community,” says Trejbalová, “that’s why I wanted them to play this possible human micro-community, which wanders in the territory as a pack and in which decisions are taken collectively, without hierarchies.”
Referencing the philosophy of psychedelia, Trejbalová looks inward, to unsimilar states of perception, as a ways of speculating on the unsimilar states of a distant, flattened future. “Our interpretation of the world is veritably anthropocentric, but it can be defused,” she asserts. “There are states of transubstantiation that help us to perceive the world in a variegated perspective and this, in my opinion, is fundamental to empathise with what surrounds us and of which we are part. Psychedelia is one of the possibilities – I won’t say the only one, but the one that is most tightly rooted and hands wieldy – to perceive the environment we live in without stuff at the part-way of it, immersing ourselves in what surrounds us. This, by the way, has a lot to do with the role of fungi in the environment. Mine is not meant to be a eulogy to the use of psychedelic substances, but scrutinizingly all psychedelic drugs, plane LSD, originate in moulds or fungi.” Tapping into the psychedelic to think through a flattened Anthropocene, Trejbalová conjures something unescapable Haraway’s siring of a Chthulucene, a “sympoietic” dream of an interconnected, interdependent ecosystem, untethered from the duelling forces of the developmental and the catastrophic, a nonlinear history of a flattened earth. “The Chthulucene does not tropical in on itself; it does not round off; its contact zones are ubiquitous and continuously spin out loopy tendrils,” describes Haraway.
Following withal these tendrils leads Trejbalová to a depiction of non-linear time, in which localised events, an tideway to an island, a tingle through undergrowth, a riverside gathering of settlers, are juxtaposed with planetary scale, time-lapse footage of the world at various phases of its new history. “One of the sources of inspiration for the work is the typesetting Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, expressly considering of its non-linear vision of the history of the planet and of mankind,” she explains. “The past, the present and the future are constantly remixed, unescapable the present with detachment. I wanted the mucosa to have a structure similar to the book: the story begins without the catastrophe, but over time it is revisited, no longer considered as a ending but as one among many other events that have happened.” In flattening out the Anthropocene into a new, tentacular Chthulucene, Trejbalová collapses linear time into a swirling mass of refracted colour, this new Earth’s flit of the past, present and future. Evoking the sentient ocean of gel from Stanisaw Lem’s Solaris, Isle Of The Unsimilar Sun begins and ends in this cosmic petri dish, in which, on both a microscopic and macroscopic scale, Trejbalová suggests a new way of thinking out of the Anthropocene thinking with the Chthulucene towards new and vibrant forms of evolution.
For increasingly information well-nigh Natália Trejbalová and her work you can find her on Instagram. You can hear Spirito di Lupo on 4 canzoni, a tape from Italian punk imprint Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni.
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