Outlandish
"I was really struck by Outlandish, by the misture of missing figures and excess fingers, the ghostly commentaries of Nancy, and the octopus that seems all too corporeal. I really love this work, am already haunted by it, by the way it moves between spectrality and materiality, but with a strange, even uneasy, ease."
Akira Lippit (author, Ex-Cinema & Electric Animal)
“The presentation of screen substitutes for aquariums indicates an apparently tenuous realism accorded to aquatic animal lives in the popular imagination, for it does not seem to matter very much whether these animals could be believed to be present, or indeed ever to have existed, so long as they are visible and moving. This chimes with Warnell’s observation that the occupants of an aquarium ‘hover somewhere between play, death and the image’, for the aquarium ‘functions without mortality, which does not take place here, its occupants named specimens, and as such incapable of death”.
Georgina Evans, Framing Aquatic Life, Screen Journal 2020
That these views, however troubling in their military and imperialist resonances, are currently so dominant can be in part explained by the unprecedented pollution of our oceans and skies. This also explains the rising scholarly interest in water in its intersections with film content and form. Georgina Evans (2020: 169), for example, considers the parallels between “the development of screen and aquarium exhibition practice,” examining how the cinematic frame, like the aquarium, “imposes a geometric form” on both the amorphous element of water and its creaturely inhabitants (see also Crylen, 2015). Hearne’s article in this issue raises a further, less examined topic: the development of techniques for rendering water in animation. Studies of various watery cinematic environments, from beachscapes (Handyside, 2014) and swimming pools (Brown & Hirsch, 2014) to oceanic seascapes (Balsom, 2018), now abound.
Elemental World Cinema, Authors: Tiago de Luca and Matilda Mroz, 2023
Phillip Warnell’s video Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (2009), for example, featured a performance by Jean-Luc Nancy, who read from his essay ‘L’Intrus’ (‘The Intruder’), reflecting on his own heart-transplant, his subsequent treatment for cancer, and philosophical concepts of the foreign. The other main performer was an octopus that pushed against the walls of a glass tank half-filled with water, carried upon the open deck of an otherwise deserted small boat at sea. Interweaving close-ups of Nancy in his office, manipulating a Moebius strip made from paper, with scenes of a living organ being manipulated by surgeons, and shots of the boat at sea, Outlandish offered a haptic, vivid exploration of boundaries - as a more-than-human protagonist, the octopus-organ occupied the physical heart of the gallery space...
Maeve Connolly, Exhibiting the End: Curatorial Scenarios of Burial, Contagion and Extinction. Review of Breathcrystal exhibition, Project Art Space, Dublin, 2017.
FRIEZE review of Outlandish
Erik Morse
Filmed in Strasbourg & Marseille, 2009
35mm on digital film, 20 mins
Funded by The Wellcome Collection
Cinematography, Samuel Dravet
script, ‘Strange Foreign Bodies’, Jean-Luc Nancy. Film excerpt (one of eight film episodes)