Engaging with the more-than-human world - A conversation with Bryony Dunne

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Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series. I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I'm having a conversation with Bryony Dunne. Bryony is an Irish visual artist based between Greece and Ireland. With a background in documentary photography and visual anthropology, in her work Bryony explores the relations between humanity and nature, the arbitrariness of cultural representation, the legacies of colonialism and the fantasies of human control. She is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement IV with a collective research focus on the notion of ecologies. Together, we will discuss about the use of storytelling and film narration in challenging our anthropocentric worldview. Bryony, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you! It's really nice to be here.

Bryony, let's start from the beginning. I know that your studies are in design and set design and you have a Master's in Cultural Heritage. One could say that you haven't followed the usual academic path of becoming an artist, but I'm always curious to know where one comes from. Would you like to share a bit about your background and how did you start working with film?

Sure! As you said, I studied interior design and set design for my undergraduate studies and for a couple of years I worked in film, in larger productions on set design and then I spent some time working on different conservation projects. That brought me to decide to study heritage conservation and a strand in that was visual anthropology, which brought me to a site in Egypt to do some research, initially for one month. It was in relation to this network of gardens that are situated in South Sinai. I was living in London at the time and after the one-month research was up, I didn't quite feel I had gathered enough information. Also, I felt like I didn't know the site as well as I wanted to or the people or the landscape and I decided not to go back to London to write this Master's research. I decided to stay at the site to write it, but also to continue this visual research that I had started, which then evolved into a film project 'The Orchard Keepers' (2014). So, one of the interviews that I was carrying out as part of the research was with this woman called Amaria. She was 75 years old when I met her and she had more than two children. She had decided at this age to go and live by herself in the mountains and restore this family garden that she had. After having this interview with her she suggested to me "Why don't you make a film about me?" I thought about it and I stayed with her. I stayed with her three weeks and I just started filming her, because I had my camera with me. I documented her life while living with her. When she would go and herd her goats I would go with her, picking herbs in the mountains and then from everything to how she takes care of her garden. I really had no intention of making this film, but it was also questioning my own position as this kind of foreign documentarian and feelings of discomfort and the problematic of representation. In the beginning of the film I explored that kind of realm of late 19th Century - early 20th Century photography in the sense of how a lot of like foreign photographers and artists would come and make work in the desert, of desert people. So, I started to kind of explore all this realm and my own position in making this film. After that, I wrote my thesis and I made this film. I had shot all the footage and then I was invited to do a residency in Cairo in the Townhouse Gallery, which is now closed. When I was there I edited the film with a friend and I worked on a photo book - Seeds From The Zoo (2016). That was my first film, but during that process I started to work on another film. Very naturally it evolved into another film.

You also brought up a very important concern or consideration that the author needs to think about, the position of the author and the relationship with the subjects. By watching your films and digging a little bit more into your work it seems to me that the relations that you develop with your subjects, which become more of collaborators along the way, are very important elements in your work. I'm keeping this kind of curiosity that you have about meeting new people and learning from them and the amount of time that you dedicate to build this relationship with these people and not only people. After Egypt you moved to Greece. What brought you to Greece? Was it another story?

Yeah! I think it's more of a theme, a subject that I became interested in. I started to look at the movement of birds from the Middle East into Europe and people. That was a project that brought me to film in Greece. Part of the film starts off in Cairo and it moves to the island of Lesbos, which is one of the most important stopovers for migratory birds. There are a lot of scientists that spend the spring and the autumn in Lesbos documenting these birds. These birdwatching holidays happen on the island. So, I joined the Hellenic Ornithological Society and I went on one of these birdwatching holidays. It was a trip. It was for me a research. Then, I spent time with the different organizations that are working in Lesbos documenting people moving through the island. It was the same apparatus of telescopes and binoculars and cameras that were used by the birdwatchers, but then also all the volunteers and the organizations that are watching people moving across. It's a very harsh and strange juxtaposition that exists on the island where it's all this kind of observing and looking and documenting species, both human and birds.

You're bringing up a very bleak topic in our discussion. You've mentioned that, but it wasn't the first time that you worked with the birds or with non-human others that become the protagonists of your films and I can't help but wonder whether these stories of the non-human species is for you a metaphor to describe or better understand the human story.

I think that's what it is. The film that you previously mentioned is 'Above the law' (2019) which I filmed partly in Lesbos. My idea was to partly film this from the perspective of a bird. So, I worked with trained falconeers that attach cameras to the back of these eagles. Essentially it is an attempt to try and challenge this anthropocentric viewpoint, but also to show the ease of movement from one species compared to the other. Of course, these birds are captive and we are placing these cameras on the back of their backs, but it does show that harsh parallel of the essential kind of movement for birds for survival, their ease of movement compared to people on land.

The notion of the border and how that changes between species.

Exactly! From 'Above the law', I made a film called 'Killing the Messengers' (2020), which is more specifically about bird migration, documenting these scientists on the island of Antikythera. On the very final scene of the film there is this perspective from a satellite, from Google Earth, which is basically following the way that a bird was tracked from one of these scientists. They passed me over all their data, so I made this visual map where it leaves Antikythera and it arrives in Chad. It shows the movement all across this vast landscape, all across the Mediterranean, from North Africa all the way down. It's like this viewpoint where there are no human-made constructs of borderlines, geopolitical divisions, or names. Essentially this would be how a bird would see the landscape. This process was so interesting, because in Google Earth, you have all these different layers that you can place on what you want to see and then just remove them. All of a sudden, you're given this satellite view of just the landscape of what it would perhaps look like.

Another layer of this film that you also touch upon in a way is climate change. Because the birds are carriers of information and data that the scientists can track, all the changes that are happening to the environment through the movement of the birds and the change of their roots because of climate change. There is also this part.

Yeah! Well, I start the film off with how birds were used as these omens to predict the future and how they were used by these mantises. These mantises would stand on certain observational points in and around Greece to look for these birds and to attempt to observe their flight or their calls or their movements and these would be interpreted as predictions of the future, as omens. However, many years later, we have these scientists at this bird observatory on the island of Antikythera that are carrying their own forms of observation, but more from a kind of collecting these raw data that is then transcoded into this knowledge to understand our environment and the changes in it. For instance, they were recording the wingspan of each bird, the fat muscle, or they were taking ticks that they would find from the birds and they would analyze them in this lab in Norway. What they were finding is that, because the climate in Europe is getting warmer, these ticks are able to survive long enough, to reproduce, whereas before it was too cold for them. So, these birds are kind of indices of changes and how they're monitored.

In a way they tell us "be careful". I can trace an interest in mythology in your work, but I'll get back to that later. Now, I want to change a bit the discussion and bring it back to The School of Infinite Rehearsals that you were part of. You were part of Movement IV which had a research focus on the notion of ecologies. I would like to ask you what prompted you to apply and what was your specific interest in the subject that was proposed by James, "Everything equally evolved"?

I was interested in joining this residency in the sense that as I've just explained my artistic rhetoric of where I have come from to where I am now. It's been very much this kind of self-driven, independent form of research and exploration. One of the questions that were brought forward at the beginning of the residency and which is somewhat the framework of the overall question of the residency was how do we engage with the more-than-human world and the periphery that is the Mediterranean. Afterwards we questioned ourselves. Did we engage with the more-than human-world, which we didn't really. We talked about it. I think what I had is more of a basic question and certainly afterwards of what is the real value of engaging with the more-than-human world if we first can't engage with ourselves and each other? I really thought about that during the residency and the concepts of what is engagement and how far can engagement go. I think it's quite an easy thing to write about engagement, but how do we enact that and embody that in our day-to-day lives, out of our roles as artists and writers and curators. That's what I think I was very interested in kind of questioning.

That answers my next question, which was what is your most important or interesting finding or learning from the more-than-human world. I think you already answered that we need to better relate to each other first.

I think so.

There was another group activity that you did with Kenneth Pietrobono that was like a critical thinking activity with language. As a group you decided to make a list of words that you wouldn't use in your vocabulary for the duration of six weeks and some words that you would like to keep. Did you have any particular words in mind?

Yeah, I was trying to think this actually. I was trying to think of what words.

Ecologies.

Yes, we took that out. We took out colonialism. I think the word that I wanted to take out was also feminism.

Was it because you felt critical about the way that this terminology has been used?

Well, the idea was to attempt to talk about these things without actually just using the word. How can we talk about it in a different way? Cause so much emphasis is just put on that word. Would it make us then relate to other aspects that we're talking about in a different way, if that one word isn't used?

I suppose, first of all, we need to ground ourselves, as you said before, before starting engaging with each other and with the other, whatever that is. This reminds me somehow of the walk that we did together in Pelion, where we went on a trip as a group and you took us to the cave of Chiron, who was a Centaur in ancient Greek mythology. Actually, when I was reading about Chiron, I learned that he was a tutor of various Greek heroes like Jason and Achilles, and he was teaching them astronomy, botanical sciences and healing practices, which relate a lot to the theme. There are a lot of connotations in Greek history about the idea of the cave as a journey from ignorance to knowledge, the most prominent one being Plato's cave and I was wondering, why did you decide to take us there? Or how did you end up finding this cave?

I had been to Pelion a couple of months back during the lockdown. Caves have always interested me. In Irish mythology it's a place where this kind of fairy-folk -they're called De Tuatha De Danann-, which is this kind of supernatural beings that live underground and you can access this land either by going underwater or through these kind of portals to these caves. Also, in Irish mythology, there's a lot of re-occurrence of metamorphosis of like human-animal. So, another reason why I wanted to bring the group to this cave and how symbolic this cave is in the transformation is that metamorphosis is not only on a physical realm and the idea of this kind of dressing up that we did on the last night, but also on a psychological aspect. When we're transforming our bodies are changing, but also the environment that we live in is changing and nothing in this world keeps its form. I think metamorphosis is a reminder of that. Also, I like the idea of this human-animal metamorphosis in that we are essentially animals and perhaps if we can relate more to our animal selves and engage more with that animal self, perhaps we can engage more with each other.

So, from "everything equally evolved" to "everyone equally transformed".

Yes!

I feel, by "reading" your films that myth plays a huge role in your work or there are mythological elements and aspects in many of your films. In one of our previous discussions, you also said that you're interested in the question of how we can recreate myths. What is the role of myth in your work?

I don't know so much about mythology, but I want to know more. I'm learning more. I'm currently working on a film, which is about a rhinoceros horn and how myths have created a role in how this rhino horn is used, both in the past and present, and how the myth of the unicorn has played a role in the story of the rhinoceros. There are some historians that actually believe that the unicorn was the rhinoceros and their first early accounts in a natural history encyclopedia by Pliny the Elder is a description of a unicorn, but for any contemporary reader, it's a rhinoceros. It says that it has thick gray hair and one horn through its forehead. This was a description of a unicorn, but there are early accounts in medieval Europe of men going into a forest and hunting down the unicorn for its magical medicinal horn and today people are hunting down the rhinoceros for its horn. What is the symbolism of the horn? In the past, the unicorn horn was used as a symbol of status and power. Today, the rhino horn is also used for the same purposes. So, how can our imagination take on these very beautiful forms, but also at the same time, myth and imagination can also take on a sinister tone as well. In many ways, I think, one of our capacities as humans is to be able to believe in myths and stories. I mean, everything from nation states to borders could be seen as myths. It's the emphasis that we're able to believe and construct our morals and identities around these myths. Maybe animals can as well. We don't know, but certainly as humans we can do that. Religion is somewhat also a myth and a story as well.

I think that's the perfect way to close our discussion. Let's hope that we can find and create new myths for the future. Thank you very much, Bryony. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for coming back and I wish your best with your film and your upcoming projects.

Thank you. So nice to chat.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.