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“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”


Dionne Brand

on a bare rock by the ocean you will never hear anything but birds whose cries blend with the sound of winds



Film
Duration: 16:06
4:3 UHD 4K Stereo Audio
Year: 2022
Spoken: N/A

Volunteers who maintain a greenhouse built in the 1860s in a small, northern Dutch village, soundtrack their maintenance labour with vocal re-creations from the archives of Hercules Florence, French Brazilian amateur scientist and ‘isolate inventor of photography’, who, in 1821, intending to birth a new acoustic branch of Biology, transcribed Brazilian animal calls to send to the French scientific institutes.

The tropical greenhouse is the paragon of the construction of nature as tropical spectacle, a montage of discontinuous seasons, climates, and ecosystems, narrating ecological travelogues for the spectator passing through the hard cut of the glass door. Within, ‘nature’ is a collage of image making practices, inherited from the colonial period of scientific expeditions sending specimens to the emerging institutes of the metropole.

‘On a bare rock by the ocean you will never hear anything but birds whose cries blend with the sound of winds’ is a tonal work on the construction of ecologies as image practice emergent contemporaneously with traditions of photographic and filmic image making, and the maintenance of colonial spectacle.