CAMILLE & ULYSSE

screening of the film Camille & Ulysse (2021) by Diana Toucedo, and dialogue with Diana Toucedo and Mónica Nepote.

August 12th, 2023, 7pm
op.cit. dialogues: colonia del Valle, Mexico City
for more information: info@fundacionopcit.org

Philosophers Vinciane Despret and Donna Haraway weave their voices together in this audiovisual piece by filmmaker Diana Toucedo, based on the fables: Haraway's The Camille Stories and Despret's Autobiography of an Octopus. In an indefinite future, Camille and Ulysse tell the intertwined stories of the first generation of their communities of humans and non-humans: the composting communities. Camille symbolically associates herself with the monarch butterflies, whose migratory routes and habitats in the United States, Mexico and Canada are threatened. Ulysses, like all Ulysses in the community, experiences the possibility of living in the presence of the extinct octopuses by learning the unique gestures, language and forms of sensitivity of these marine animals.

Filmed with the structure of an oral history and as a correspondence between the two authors and their stories, the film follows the ways of living and dying of the communities of a damaged planet and their growing mastery of a new field of scientific knowledge: therolinguistics, or the study of animal languages. The narrators, in harmony with their fellow symbiotes, become increasingly aware of the possibilities for growth of tentacular and metamorphic beings.

This encounter provoked by Spanish filmmaker Diana Toucedo contains a perspective attuned to the mysteries of the natural world, the blurred boundaries between what we know and what we sense, Toucedo joins Haraway and Despret in the construction of this narrative journey made of multiple intersecting lines, a game of strings where speculative fiction and experimental essay merge as symbionts.

http://dianatoucedo.com/projects/camilleulysse/