On Capture

Hermione Spriggs | Earth Swimmers

In collaboration with mole catcher Nigel Stock; field recordings and sound design with Jez riley French

Earth Swimmers lends its ears to the tricks and techniques of a mole catcher in North Yorkshire. The film attends to forms of land-based practice and ecological understanding that remain hidden in plain sight, and to the strange allegiance between hunter and prey. Tactics are shared and exchanged between mole catcher and filmmaker, asking thorny questions of what it means to track, to capture, to hear and to feel beyond one’s own species perspective. Probes, feet and worm-charming instruments grant access to the mole’s vibratory world, enticing the viewer into alternative ways of sensing and knowing the earth.

Helena Hunter | Postnatural Supernatural, Falling Birds and Liquefactions

Helena will present film, poetry and sound works from her recent projects Postnatural Supernatural and Falling Birds, along with a reading of Liquefactions, a current work in progress. Postnatural Supernatural blends poetics and sound with film to consider tree spirit beliefs within rural communities of the Philippines and how these intersect with colonisation, deforestation and bird decline. Falling Birds asks what songs extinct and endangered birds might sing, how we might hear their stories and what their representation in museums hides and reveals.

Mark Peter Wright | The Sound Hunter

Mark Peter Wright will perform the presence of a sound hunter, a character that operates in the margins of audibility, often discerned through the slightest of movements; the shuffle of feet or husk of breath. Playful, critical and absurd, the work mixes live and pre-recorded sound, voice, actions and amplified materials. It highlights the overlaps between hunting and preservation and the paradoxes of power embroiled in the desire to capture, archive and compose place and its more-than-human inhabitants.

Image: Hermione Spriggs, Earth Swimmers (video still).