Interspecies infrastructure in the becoming

Adrian Demleitner, University of Bern, FS 2023
Exploring Human and More-than-Human Relationships

In the following I’d like to reflect on the production of my short film Visiting that I produced for the seminar on Exploring Human and More-than-Human Relationships. I will begin with setting the historic frame of the place where the piece was made, loose a few words about the practical aspects of production, reflect on the process, and end with an aspect that is dear to me: The political dimension of this project.

The piece plays out in a small stretch of an artificial water-stream, that forks of from the river Suze. This river flows down from the Jura mountains and crosses my hometown Biel/Bienne in the northern part of the city. To the south of the city we have another river, the Aare, which exits the city’s adjoint lake and forms the natural border to the small village of Nidau. It is this river which was shaping the local geography for thousands of years. It’s flowing, reflowing and overflowing led to the formation of the local wetlands, aptly named the Great Moss, an area mainly consisting of Malaria-infested swamps. Two large-scale waterway corrections in the 19th century formed the basis for a new industrial area, which is called Seeland today. I believe this framing to be important to understanding the regions’ relation to water and water-related infrastructures.

In my short piece, I wanted to recreate the experiences I made while engaging with a specific site in my neighbourhood, which includes two dams along the Suze and its sidearms. One is built by humans, and one by beavers.

Production

Before reflecting on the piece, I want to go into its production. The location is very close to where I lived at the time of the recording. It’s a path that is used by many locals to get to other places in the city. Next to uncounted crossings on my behalf, I also visited the location six times specifically to produce recordings. I missed the chance to make paper-based notes and mappings, and relied only on my mobile phone. I acquired a Zoom iQ7, which plugs right into my phone and produces good enough recordings.

With this setup, I produced roughly 4 GB of media material, which consistsg of 1.5 hours of sound material and 30 minutes of video material. The latter is composed of mostly 20 seconds long still shots of situations that captured my attention.

Since I walked this path many ways, it became obvious to me, that I wanted to build my piece around the audio-recording of a walk from one dam to the other. That choice gave a lot of form to the rest that followed. I then wanted to structure visual material around three or four of the main sites of the short walk. This decision was guided by the need to get away from thinking through capturing video. The practice of recording sound only was very influential on my understanding of multi-modal ethnographies, and I wanted to have that as a starting point.

For reasons of representation of my idea, which I will go into further down, I considered making an interactive piece instead of a film. That would have allowed me to stay much closer to what I intended and add a map as another medial dimension. It would have been feasible within my knowledge and skills, but I believe I would have taken on too much regarding how much time I can invest into the production. Hence, stuck to audio, video and video-editing.

Reflection

There are many things I could reflect on, but to stay within my given limits I’d like to focus on the absence of the beaver, multi-modal practices, the aesthetics of media production and the transportation of knowledge in non-textual media.

Having not encountered the beavers in all of my recording sessions certainly was disappointing at times. It even became a kind of running gag at our bi-weekly seminar-sessions. Nonetheless, did this absence help in reflecting my expectations towards the beavers, and their supposed naturalness. The beaver is not a common animal in an urban environment, and knowing they’re present excited me. Myself, as well as some of the people I spoke to, sensationalized this manifestation. The tension that their absence created indicated how I was framing them. The realization of this framing made me focus rather on the environment and the beavers’ impact on it.

This came well together with the multi-modal recording practice. Especially, the sound-recording essentially changes my personal access to the chosen location. Whereas before if framed it mainly through pleasing video-shots, I experience it now much more as a fluid assemblage. Soundscapes don’t contain clear borders between the things that they capture. They’re built through gradients and layerings, enabling the listener to sense several sources at the same time: road and river, industrial fan and birds, bicycles and trees.

These two aspects, the absence of the beavers and the multi-modal recording, led to the experience of a living assemblage of interspecies being. It consisted of artificial and industrial components, of people passing by, of flora and fauna, but also of impressions in my mind. An experience that changed with each visit, and the experience I wanted to recreate in my piece. With all the recordings at hand, the editing phase was due. Knowing the necessary software, I was able to focus on playing around with ideas of assembling the material.

In this course, I got to know multimodal pieces as quite fuzzy regarding the transfer of knowledge. Especially sound-walks suffer clarity when no context is provided. My wish was simply to work on the idea of visiting multi-species situations through multi-modal ethnographies as an epistemological gesture. I wanted to transport my experience of feeling invited to go to this place as a way of knowing, valid on its own. After pursuing this wish through several edit sessions, I found it tough to bring the rectangular aesthetics of film in accordance with my intentions. There is a stark contrast in a living multi-species assemblage and the hard edges of a video-frame.

I attempted to play with this tension through the application of montage in a two-fold manner. First, I started to pile up the video shots onto each other to blur the lines of linear narration and clear-cut images. As a second intervention, I dispersed text in between the visuals, trying to find a balance of being as informative as necessary and as vague as possible. Through these two applications, I tried to point the viewer in the direction of thought and experience without guiding and framing too much.

The political dimension of this manifestation

In the following I want to delve on a thought that I originally had in the piece, but left it out to not overload it. The historical dimension of the Great Moss, the politics surrounding the beaver family and their stay as well as the landscape of the location of the piece point towards capitalist tensions of extraction and usefulness.

Beavers are not endangered any more, and their population is luckily growing. There are an estimated 3000 individuals living in Switzerland at this moment. Despite their small numbers, their environmental impact is large and swift, changing landscapes within weeks. This process is directly perceivable by us. Beaver dams are unlike hyperobjects. And yet still, they raise questions and challenges for which we are not prepared. The only language we find is quantifying the costs and benefits. Essentially, we’re unable to find common ground, let alone a shared vocabulary of being together.

Biel/Bienne is like many other industrial and urban zones prone to the presence of fallows, its German equivalent Brache being much more encompassing and fitting. A fallow is characterized by a period of being unproductive. Described from critical politics, fallows are a temporary break in the capitalist death drive. They allow the things and beings present to rest and unfold by their own doings. Fallows are temporary autonomous zones, simply by being unsupervised. The legal owners of a fallow do not care much what happens during the unproductive period. When the time comes, they will reset the space in question, remove all disturbance, and make the fallow productive again.

The sidearm of the Suze, in which the beavers made their home, is such a fallow. The sidearm is completely artificial, and is guided by a bed of concrete, even partially flowing under the city. It is not that they built their dam and den there because parts of it were re-naturalised, but because it was unused, unproductive and unsupervised. The re-naturalisation was for aesthetical reasons, to increase the value of the newly built apartment-complex nearby, and not as a general invitation to the more-than-human. The beavers’ dam was fortified with overflow pipes to mitigate the risk of damage to the apartment-complex. The beavers share their small stream with human debris, plastic items, industrial waste, dog excrements and other output that we humans feel is OK to let go into an unsupervised water-stream.

Nonetheless, they came and stayed, simply because they could. I’d love to point to this manifestation and read it as something meaningful. All ugliness withstanding, more-than-human life is taking residency, wherever it can, proving life in capitalist ruins to be a possibility.