Children of the Soil

300 word summary statement.

Children of the Soil is a practice-led experimental screendance film that investigates how gravity and decay act as metaphors set against a playful comic-strip like form that re-arranges graphic novel panels in time. The research asks: how might screendance and its ecosomatic descendants reconfigure temporal linearity by choreographing the geography of the screen rather than than through bodies in time?

Methodologically, the project formalises four interlocking constraints: (1) a durational score of “falling slowly to ground,” producing repeatable kinaesthetic data; (2) timelapse capture to register environmental change alongside muscular fatigue; (3) post-production “spatialising of time,” arranging footage into graphic-novel panels whose order, scale and adjacency replace conventional montage; and (4) short textual inserts that situate the human within more-than-human lifeworlds (after Abram and allied thinkers). Together these procedures generate a reproducible compositional method – panel-based temporal choreography – that can be applied beyond this film.

The work sits in dialogue with ecosomatic and posthuman screen practices (e.g., Mendieta; McPherson; Davie & Mettler; Salzer; Terranova; Hinton) yet departs from human-centred or human-absent frames by foregrounding the vulnerability of the idea of a body. The panel grid turns the screen into a score where acts of falling, vegetal growth, insect movement and weather occupy equal temporal authority.

Children of the Soil was developed through constrained iteration during a month-long Nature, Art & Habitat residency (Taleggio Valley, Italy, June 2022), where methods were tested across sites and times of day, and by public presentation at its premiere at Light Moves Festival in November 2023. The research offers (i) a transferable editing grammar for “spatialised time” in screendance; and (ii) an ecosomatic protocol that couples bodily fall with environmental timescales. Texts draw on Bubandt, Rilke, Berry, Phap Dung, Haraway, Swanson, Tsing and Gan, informing the film’s ethical stance toward the more-than-human.