Nic & Nunc

A sensory exploration of the forest and the tensions that inhabit it, Osmosis interweaves images of pure chlorophyll and the dense blackness of burnt forests. The dynamics of these cycles of life and death imprinted pictorially on 16mm film are amplified by a soundscape articulating sensations of anxiety and appeasement, connecting human and non human in an organic mesh.

An immersion in the desert with a Bolex and some questions… How do we perceive “nature”? Is it a “thing” to which we, humans, are external? Or are we all part of a mesh without center or periphery? Can film help us to perceive nature not as a thing, but as a living entity endowed with sensitivity and agency?

Seeming as though they’ve been there for ever, marked by the two moraines along the snowslide, the glacier is enormous. Looking majestic, timeless in a monochrome landscape, it is imposing, but turns out to be vulnerable too. The objects it spits out: empty tins, the skeletal remains of an airplane, are the manifestation of man’s fleeting passage, and bear witness to its continued and irreversible thawing. Yet it still resists.

In 1947, Marie Tinguely leaves her homeland to go work in a hospital for the Swiss mission in the South African bush. After her death, the films shot over 25 years as a missionary, as well as some of the letters she wrote are found in a family apartment. I decide to explore them.

Amid landscapes of confused memories, Doctor L, a missionary in southern Africa, recounts his journeys and adventures in the bush, intensive evangelisation efforts and surgical operations at the end of the 19th century. 150 years later, four inhabitants of the region send him a letter in the form of sound capsules, evoking a past whose traces can still be keenly felt.