I watched a beautiful 3 minute film this morning, shared into my inbox by the Centre for Humans and Nature, a digital and print press that explores what it means to be human in an interconnected world.
Before I ditched my Meta apps, I was woefully lax on actually reading their, or any, newsletter content. One of the joys of giving up the ‘Gram and the ‘Book has been filling the empty time (and need for dopamine!) with articles and long-form updates from organisations that inspire me.
The Centre is a wonderful collective of animistic and earth-centred thinking. It’s lucky enough to call the esteemed indigenous writer and academic Robin Wall Kimmerer one of its core contributors (anyone with even a passing interest in what it means to live in kinship with the world should put Braiding Sweetgrass on their reading/listening list!). It shares and highlights work from across creative mediums by artists of all levels of public recognition; from celebrity to unknown.
Today’s video ‘Captives’ was created by artist Zoe Sadokierski and fiction writer Ceridwen Dovey. They use paper-theatre to bring to life the plight of the platypus, who were ‘protected’ and studied by Australian naturalist Henry Burrell in the late 19th/early 20th Century.
The piece is deceptively simple in its storytelling, yet deeply, emotionally complex. It questions how nature conservation and study might be perceived if the beings being ‘assisted’ were given voice and the capacity for feeling and self-identification.
I’ve long wrestled with this question. I find zoos, aquariums, and animal sanctuaries strangely morbid places. I have never been able to embrace the exuberant joy I see in my own child when they visit them, because I feel something inherently wrong in standing on one side of a glass or cage (however enriched it may be) to simply stare at the not-human inhabitant. I have never been able to shake the sense of violation, of voyuerism, and of breaking some vital element of right to privacy and freedom.
It feels no different to staring at a caged person… and who in this day and age would argue it was right to do that? To place a human being in an enclosed ‘sanctuary’ to save them from extinction? Some would argue that our species is more likely to do the opposite, and speed certain human extinctions along. Or perhaps is this simply animal refugee-ism. But then why do we fail to provide the clean, safe, enriched environments for threatened humans that we do for big cats and primates? And surely they still share that sense of dislocation from one’s homeland.
This isn’t a blog about the efficacy of zoos and the like. I am not sure if I’ll ever come to an easy understanding, because I cannot ignore the great damage our species has done to the more-than-human world and its habitats, and the vital need for us to take some responsibility. Perhaps these places achieve that. I’m sure some do. I hope some do.
This is a blog to say: find 3 minutes today to go and watch Zoe and Ceridwen’s fantastic film.
Let their delicate storytelling and graceful paper-animation, surrounded by the vaudevillian campness of silent movies, take you on an emotional journey of questions and unclear answers.
Meet a platypus.
Consider how difficult it must be to reconcile your sense of safety with one designed by an alien from a different world.
Ask yourself: who is the most outlandish character here? The talking platypus, or the man who dug into creek beds to construct a tank with holes, just so he could pet one?
Imbolc is a time of stirring seeds, and this short film stirred me today. Stirred me to consider what home really looks like and to reflect on how much of a privilege, a blessing and (you might say) a human and more-than-human right it is to get to shape your home to your own needs and preferences.
I’ve just moved house. I’m still in the village I love, but we have more rooms, new carpets, a different view outside the kitchen window. I wrote once about how important place was to me. How I found magic in setting roots into a landscape and a location that resonated with my spirit, that seemed to welcome me and mine.
In the light of this film and the tentative energy of Imbolc, I am feeling the precariousness of this most recent shift in space and my sense of home. It’s not been easy to live in a house full of boxes, that doesnt feel, smell or sense like our old place did. Even though this house is superior in many ways, to what we had before, the environment does not yet feel quite right. I cannot fully relax. I am dislocated and my nervous system is uncertain whether the logical benefits of the move will ever outweigh the sense of being lost.
I trust I will find my feet here and that my sense if identity will flourish, once the overwhelming practiclaities of moving are done with. But until then, I feel a kinship with Platypus, and a heightened awareness of the fact that while I was able to choose this move into the unknown, she did not.
Burrell: “Do you not like it here? In here you are safe and well fed.”
Platypus: “I do, it’s just….my burrow in the riverbank…it took me a while to build.”