undergrass is a multispecies polyphony of stories locked in voices of humans and a bamboo forest in Águeda, Portugal. The film sprouted from a gathering for collective listening with the bamboo forest and is shot from the bottom-up perspective exploring human-soil relations by sensing multiple deaths and (re)births.
These stories as portals spawn questions such as how to rethink decay and decomposition, literally surfacing the need and urgency to talk about death which is virtually absent from Western discourse despite its undeniable significance for all living beings. Deeply inspired by anthropology of sound and eco-feminist audiology, the project encounters these issues from a feminist perspective. With the energy of sound we can attune more deeply with the vibrant matter of the non-human realm which is the matter of concern at the threshold between life and death.
Touching upon queer ecology and care, the project hosted a con-sensual ritualistic act by Matteo De Blasio based on the adoption of limoni seeds, experimenting with interspecies kinship systems in a fanta-futuristic (im)possible institution. The multi-sensorial installation, thus, explored in situ the materialities and temporalities of two regenerative acts as part of the multi-sited and transmedial research in southern Europe by fellow member Eugenia Gianno Grassroots initiatives fertilizing eco-social futures of collective care and creativity in a planetary crisis. It was hosted by the group exhibition Echoed Realms at Flutgraben, Berlin, on 20-21 October 2023.
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