Camille & Ulysse + Conversation

As part of Shaping Bonds, this evening brings together two different artworks that explore Donna Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble and The Camille Stories: Children of Compost. Director Diana Toucedo and Polymorf, the team behind Symbiosis will have a conversation about this inspiration, how they translated Haraway's writing into their work and what they took away from these multi-species scenario’s for today’s world. 

Camille & Ulysse

Somewhere in the future, on a damaged planet Earth, Camille and Ulysse live in their “communities of compost,” where animal and vegetable organisms, technologies, and earth strata merge. They are the first generation of children in a society where humans and non-humans live in symbiosis: Camille adopts butterfly traits to help her study the endangered North American monarch butterfly, while on the coast of Naples, Ulysse explores ways of living together with extinct octopuses, in preparation for their unlikely return.

The stories of Camille and Ulysse are read by philosophers Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret, who previously wrote these fables independently. Filmmaker Diana Toucedo has now made them into a narrated and partially animated journey. The boundary between the known and the intuitive blurs in a work that appeals to the imagination, somewhere between storytelling, science fiction, and an experimental visual essay.