Verena Paravel is a filmmaker, artist and anthropologist whose work engages the limits of perception, using image and sound to cross aesthetic, ethical and sensory thresholds.
Her recent audiovisual practice has made use of novel instruments to attempt a drastic upsetting of the anthropocentric worldview. Exploring the deep sea, the upper atmosphere, infrasonic regions of vibration, and the codes between tiny animals, she seeks to restore our experience of being one species among millions, changing the way we feel we belong to the world.
This search has led her to doubt the visual medium. “Nobody is listening — ever, or not enough,” she says. “The solution might be to be very humble again with the gaze, and very ambitious with what we can listen to.”
In Unstill, a new work created by Paravel for Reethaus and spatialized with MONOM, we are presented with a sound portrait of a restless world in which other species exchange signals and orient, cry out and shudder, eat and move. Seeking out the scientists that are listening most carefully to other species, Paravel traveled to the Slovenian countryside to meet a biotremologist; to the Camargue wetlands that sprawl around and betwixt the Rhône River in France; and to Japan where she visited scientific laboratories, rice fields, cemeteries and city parks. With these field recordings, Paravel has assembled a unique composition, allowing us to eavesdrop on more-than-human conversations — which, of course, are continuously disrupted and overlaid by human ones.
This November 29, Reethaus and Soundwalk Collective invite you to listen in on a loquacious planet with an Open Haus dedicated to this new work by Verena Paravel.