Video

Trailer Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions 2019

3 channel HD, colour, sound, 16:9, 20′ CREDITS: Concept and Script: Monica Ursina Jäger Camera: Monica Ursina Jäger / Michael Zogg Video Editing: Myrien Barth Animation: Anja Sidler Composition and Sound: Michael Bucher Narrator: Phil Hayes Interview: Jennie Ching Text: Monica Ursina Jäger / Damian Christinger Text editing: Aoife Rosenmeyer The three-channel video installation “Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions” 2019 is based on several months of artistic research in Singapore. A narrator - he calls himself Revenant - leads the viewer from the dense skylines of a metropolis deep into the networks of the primeval forest and back into a hybrid world of urban and natural structures. As a « Returner « he has experienced many conditions, times and places, and recounts the forest from the multi-perspective of an anthropologist, biologist and poet. These narrations are interwoven with stories of a Singapore- Chinese woman recalling past times, her childhood memories of specific places and animistic parallel worlds. The complex image-text collage combines images from urban and natural spaces, painting and animation and continuously alludes to various forms of co-existence, collaboration and co-habitation of human and non-human entities. Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions 2019 approaches the forest as a spatially complex structure, as a place of multi-layered contexts and inter-dependencies, as well as a place of imagination, narration and memory. Centuries of colonization have shaped natural habitats: from imperialist territorial claims to scientific systematization and taxonomic classification practices. The installation however shows the forest not only as a resource, infrastructure and service provider, but also as an ecosystem of transtemporal and translocal character. The forest is shown as an inherently ambivalent setting of matter and knowledge, as a rationalized environment, but also as a place of irrational stories. The installation ultimately poses the question of to what extent the forest can serve as a model for sustainable urban development in the future.

RETE MIRABILE (counter-current) 2020

video, sound, colour, 4k, 6:55 min CREDITS: Concept and camera: Monica Ursina Jäger Sound: Michael Bucher RETE MIRABILE (counter-current) 2020 is a meditation on the complexities of natural networks. In a kaleidoscopic environment, the work imagines a space removed from time and space. Both prehistoric and post-human in its conceptualization, biological units, fantastical creatures and specks of light interweave to form a continuous countercurrent. Shapes and structures interact both with and against each other, accumulating into fluid hyperobjects and thus creating complex spatial configurations that resist linear interpretation. Singular subjects evade hierarchic structures and co-create a collective choreography. RETE MIRABILE (counter-current) is an observation of the interactions between biological bodies, a wondrous contemplation of forces and counterforces, influence and currents.