Celine Caly (DE/UA) is an artist and designer who is fascinated by ecological systems. She re-imagines relationships between, and with non-human worlds aiming to encourage people to think about our interwoven existence with our surroundings. Her practice is grounded in my experience in holistic farming, nurturing the continuous symbiosis between storytelling and research while centering sustainability and interdependence. Working medium fluidly across audiovisuals, text, installation and workshops, She creates poetic and immersive experiences that transcend the theoretical towards the visceral. She treats found footage like compost, speculative worldbuilding becomes fertile ground for pressing dialogs, meditative journeys stimulate multispecies healing. This is a way for her, not just to acknowledge our current climate emergencies and stimulate playful and imaginary thinking, but also to create spaces that explore resilience, grief, collectivity, solidarity and hope.
earthing Bodies [short film version] - In a time where we are confronted with the possibility of mass global soil erosion by 2050, the work “earthing Bodies” in collaboration with sound artist William Boon, reflects on our current ecological disconnection and investigates how we can see our ground not just as earth's surface layer but experience it as a membrane towards reciprocal communities of microbial bodies. Transforming conversations with soil microbial ecologist Lettice Hicks, the work is an ambient experience inviting us into the spell of composting and harvesting as everyday rituals that connect us to these decomposers that build earth’s most fundamental life giving skin.
The experimental video is a journey through rhythmic cycles and textural details, decomposing the sharp image and delving into the haptic blur towards an imaginary microbial world of flourishing growth and decay. Questioning the role of video as surface medium, the film has been constructed as an archive of macro footage of soil surfaces. Emphasizing the evolution of timbre and texture over motif and melody in both imagery and sound, the video is an ambient symbiosis towards a meditative experience and appreciation for what grounds us.
The Pill - In a collaboration with Andrea Galano and Merle Findhammer, The Pill is a speculative film, constructed with found footage. It explores how the act of taking a pill in the future can save us from oblivion about nulear waste disposal.
This film tries to answer the question “How do we communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to the future?”
As we do not have any communciation that has survived for the time span of which nuclear waste is going to be dangerous for the planet, this question is only able to be answered speculatively.
Summarized with an intake ritual as salvation of its effects for our human body, we examined at the same time our present relationship with capsules, tabs and pills.
earthing Bodies (Installation) - In a time where we are confronted with the possibility of mass global soil erosion by 2050, the work “earthing Bodies” in collaboration with sound artist William Boon, reflects on our current ecological disconnection and investigates how we can see our ground not just as earth's surface layer but experience it as a membrane towards reciprocal communities of microbial bodies. Transforming conversations with soil microbial ecologist Lettice Hicks, the work is an ambient experience inviting us into the spell of composting and harvesting as everyday rituals that connect us to these decomposers that build earth’s most fundamental life giving skin.
The work has been first developed as a multisensory installation, in which mycelium sculptures are holding space for a community of screens to tell the story from compost to humus and is acompanied by a scent-scape. Later I adapted it into print and a single-channel video.
Ecosystem of Film - Between October 2020 and May 2021 I was working closely together with artist Rory Pilgrim to advise and assist him for a video ecosystem that will accompany the duo exhibition “Where the Tide takes us” at Kunstverein Braunschweig (DE) May 2021.
My engagment was directly liked by working through Rory’s digital film archive through the lense of Permaculture to create a 30-screen and 12h long ecosystem of film. Structured by the rhythm of the tides as well as one’s own breath, the exhibition changes day by day.
North Greenwich - Comissioned by sound artist Armed with Bow as part of the Creative Rewilding project (London), this is one of three videos that acoompanies a sound journey starting at North Greenwich Station and ending at the Thames Barrier.
As a landscape suspended between a state of toxic post-industrial abandonment and the large-scale corporate regeneration first ushered in by the Millennium Dome project, North Greenwich is a place of stark contrasts. The videos are created from the video “dump” of Amred with Bow’s documentation during his field recordings as well as random home videos and archived interviews/ propaganda in the youtube vortex of the bizarre y2k Millennium Dome spectacle.
