A Cage Named Garden Survey of Artists' Films at the Zoo

Introductions

Patrick Goddard, Animal Antics, 2021, 4K video, b/w, 5.1 sound, 37 min 54 sec

Patrick Goddard’s Animal Antics is a philosophical and comical short story. Shot at the London Zoo, the film portrays the conversations between Sarah, a young human, and Whoopsie, her talking dog, about the troubled state of nature.

Roman Selim Khereddine, behind a thousand bars no world, 2023, colour video, 20 min 38 sec

Roman Selim Khereddine’s behind a thousand bars no world discloses the state of zoological gardens in Palestine through news and reports written about them in the media. The film reflects on the conditions of confinement, territorial deprivation and impoverished living conditions experienced by animals and humans.

Jeannette Muñoz, Strata of Natural History, 2012, 16mm film, 11 min 45 sec

Jeannette Muñoz’s Strata of Natural History poetically portrays the artist’s search for traces of the Kawéskar indigenous people exhibited in European zoos during the 1880s. Combining archival materials and present-day footage to entangle Chile’s past and present naturecultures (a concept, coined by Donna Haraway, that assumes that nature and culture are co-dependent and cannot be separated).

Simone Forti, Untitled, 1974, VHS tape transferred to black and white video, 29 min

Closing the programme, Simone Forti’s Untitled is a rare documentation of her engagement with zoo animals. Shots of animals in captivity alternate with images of Forti. Locked up in an empty indoor space, she moves like a zoo animal: crawling, striding, endlessly pacing back and forth.

Conversations between Filipa Ramos and the filmmakers

Lisbon-born Filipa Ramos, Ph.D., is a writer and curator whose research focuses on how culture addresses ecology. She is Lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel, curator of Art Basel Film and founded the online artists’ cinema Vdrome. She edited Animals (MIT Press/Whitechapel, 2018), curated “Animalesque” (2019) (Baltic, Gateshead), and in 2024 she curated “Bestiarium”, the Catalan Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Composed of Laura Huertas Millan, Onyeka Igwe and Rachael Rakes, Counter Encounters is a curatorial and research initiative active since 2019. They engage forms of anti- and alter- ethnographies in cinema and contemporary art. Following from Tate Modern’s 2022 Counter Encounters series curated by the trio and titled Several Encounters over Plants, A Cage Named Garden explores the intersection of film and zoology, the study of all animal life.

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