The exhibition “Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor – Cosmic Realism” is the primary retrospective of labor by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Each initially educated as anthropologists, they create movies on the intersection of anthropology, documentary and visible artwork. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are continually trying to find a brand new cinematic language that emphasises the sensory. This enables them to show away from the human centred method inside classical anthropology and consider the world from a non-human perspective, albeit a typically confrontational one.

For Paravel and Castaing-Taylor, filming means researching: they shoot whereas researching and vice versa. The digicam serves as a analysis software, and the makers don’t hesitate from getting very near, and even inside, their topics. For the movie De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), which they’ve was an eight-screen set up specifically for this exhibition, they performed in depth analysis in 5 Parisian hospitals. Their digicam not solely roamed among the many sufferers, docs and nurses, but in addition penetrated into the fleshy innards of the human physique, into the aortas, blood vessels and brains of sufferers present process surgical procedure.

Just like the surgeons within the movie, the filmmakers open up a world that, to this point, has remained cinematically uncharted they usually discover it from inside, turning the human physique into one thing bestranging. However the movie doesn’t restrict itself to an examination of the physique. It additionally enters the corridors, employees rooms, cafeterias and bowels of the hospital. This turns the hospital right into a type of residing organism, its community of corridors forming a central nervous system, through which all parts exist in relationships of mutual dependency.

Perspective from the ocean

For his or her best-known movie, Leviathan (2012), a unprecedented research of the connection between humankind and the ocean, they spent months filming on a fishing cutter and hooked up a number of small GoPro cameras to the vessel, the crew and the fishing nets. With the footage, they create an natural composition that appears on the fishing business not by the eyes of the crew however relatively from the angle of the fish, the seagulls, and even the ocean itself. The movie immerses the viewer in a world of shiny jackets and slimy bycatch, the place fish eyes stare into the digicam lens from inside nets and the wrinkles of fishermen cowl their faces like scales. The bodily expertise that the viewer undergoes whereas watching is evoked by sounds as a lot as by the pictures—from frothing waves to slithering fish.

The exhibition “Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor – Cosmic Realism” invitations guests to discover seven gallery installations that showcase the event of the makers. On show isn’t solely Leviathan (2012) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), but in addition Sheep Rushes (2001–19), Commensal (2017), somniloquies (2017) and Ah Humanity! (2015). These works correspond with grand, all-encompassing themes such because the earthly, the ocean, the thoughts, the dream and the apocalypse. By emphasising the bodily and sensory, and evoking a non-human perspective, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor compose a brand new cinematic language with a cosmic perspective that now not centres on humankind however exposes the character of the inter-relationships between all residing issues.

at Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
till Could 20, 2024