Howling at the Moon

Various characters take us along into the world of the illusory community and simultaneously harsh pecking order of club culture. What is it really about, beyond the bling? Perhaps it is the primary urge to devote oneself to something greater: a feeling, belief, or pure lust for life.

A claymation animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

A claymation animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

A claymation animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

Combining claymation and music to construct a disturbing visual universe, I Wasn’t Made to Play the Son is poised between fairy tale and nightmare. Hand-modeled figures move through tension-filled scenes where famiky roles and social expectations are subverted thrugh a simultaneously grotesque and poetic register.

Set in a clearing in a forest, where the desires of the characters revolve around a mysterious cabin, into which only a chosen few are allowed. Temptation becomes a central theme in this fairy-tale setting.

A claymation animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

How to Slay a Demon confronts the theme of gluttony through the eyes of a supine woman, as a looming demon appears poised to consume her. The work offers a visceral reflection on addiction and desire, exposing the fragile boundary between pleasure and destruction.

To catch your prey you have to become the prey.

A claymation animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

A claymation animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

A claymation animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

A girl sucking her thumb into a threshold between sleep and wake, the silk-robed elephant who tucks her in; the pile of ribboned presents, a toreador preparing for cursory duels, his huge bulge spelling out the objective and feeling out the mind’s recesses in Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s teen bedroom Bacchanal. The girl moves according to the distended time of dreams procuring pastel pal after another. It suggests that the subconscious craves the kind of chaos that apparently only barbotine sex can provide. In these Delights of an Undirected Mind (2016,) a giraffe soon sits atop a petrified fox like a Hag or succubus making haunted advances, whilst dearest My Little Pony is groomed with an increasingly lewd touch. As a Wolf in Grandma’s clothing feeds the troupe milk from a nippled bottle—think Little Red Riding Ho’—both the film and the milk condense the quiet purity of babyish slumber into an eddying fantasy. Credit: Sabrina Tarasoff

Stop-motion animation about the deeply transformational experience of motherhood.

In Turn into Me, the progressive decomposition of the body of a woman is shown with surgical precision, right through to the skeleton, and animated in a final macabre dance by the inhabitants of the forest.