Two apparently distant trajectories intersected in the 1960s: the new possibilities of producing and displaying moving images (with the emergence of  Expanded Cinema) and the sphere of the natural world. This collision of artistic and environmental destinies directly affected the work of artists and filmmakers in that context and onwards.

While our current era is marked by the extension of human action over the rest of the planet (the Anthropocene), some filmmakers have engaged – and still engage in ecological practices that seek to decenter the privilege assigned to humans. Experimental cinema, in this sense, is thought of as a means of opening up our perception to the plurality of the living, of conceiving the world as an interconnected network, of and bringing to light a web between human and non-human agents.

It is a case of putting flowers on the celluloid, burying the film, inventing observation devices, letting the camera be affected by natural forces, engaging the body that films in a symbiotic relationship with the environment, and reconstituting ecosystems in the projection, among other artistic procedures. In this sense, such – ecological – resources constitute forms of practice and engagement that arouse another type of sensitivity thanks to assemblages and cooperative bonds, reshaping not only the forms of doing but also the very economy of making a film.

This program presents an excerpt of this artistic and ecological force, based on works analyzed and discussed in the anthology Expanded Nature – Écologies du cinéma expérimental, organized by Elio Della Noce  and Lucas Murari (Ed. LightCone, 2022), a book that brings together 22 international collaborators on the subject.