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Calls

Animalesque City

A call for short movies
Radical visions about human-animal cohabitation
Submission deadline: 15 March 2021 


The Animalesque Visiting School Competition invites students and professionals from all over the world to participate in the production of visionary scripts about the future agency of animals in the design and construction of urban environments. We are welcoming all kinds of creative film works, including those with limited technological resources.

Selected winners will get 1-to-1 mentoring with jury members in order to develop a high quality film which will be presented at AA School London and at the ARCH+ Cohabitation exhibition in Berlin.

What is an Animalesque City? We challenge you to express an activist and radical viewpoint through a short movie about the (future) relationships between humans and animal species in times of rapidly expanding urbanisation; to envision emergent societies in which multispecies citizens exist in symbiosis.

The medium of film enables the transmission of narratives and fiction in a critical and engaging way. Together, the selected submissions will express visionary animalesque realities, constructed from different global perspectives and seen through a multiplicity of lenses.

Context

From the time when humans lived alongside animals and moved around as nomads to gather seeds, fruit and plants to the current era in which the mass production of meat feeds the global population, our species has developed various interactions with fellow animals, which range from practical to economical as well as mythical. Such relationships have been shifting over time and in different settings as contexts of climate, geography and culture have changed.

Since the agricultural revolution, and later the eras of industrialisation, urbanisation and globalisation, our relationships with animals have become more and more exploitive. The tremendous growth of the human population in recent decades, together with our focus on property, wealth and environmental control, puts these connections under even greater pressure.

Humans are mammals, but our anthropocentric perspective has unbalanced our position within the animal kingdom and within the natural world as a whole. Animalesque proposes new ways of thinking and engineering that can help us establish interspecies collaboration based on mutuality, instead of domination and one-sided exploitation, and believes that this will lead to more resilient socio-ecological systems.

Can we build scenarios for symbiosis with the species that inhabit the world and live alongside us? What can we learn from animals by looking at how they use their senses, the ways in which they communicate and work together, the extent to which they follow their instincts, their adjustments and adaptations? And what do we have to offer from our side?


Criteria for submission

Participation is open to students and professionals from all fields in any location around the world, and all formats are allowed.

- Duration: The movie should be between two and five minutes.
- Genre: Fiction, documentary, animation and experimental film are permitted. All creative formats are valid.
- Content: Narrative and engagement potential will be considered. Does the movie trigger curiosity and excitement?
- Framing of context: How is the proposed scenario dealing with time, culture and place? There are no limits here, so think big.
- Reference to cultural interspecies relationships: Myths, legends, rituals and tales can narrate our intrinsic relationships with animals
- Addressing current and future urgent topics: for example loss of biodiversity, climate change and sprawling urbanization.

Outcomes

- Mentoring with Jury members and a lecture series in early 2021
- Exhibition of selected winning movies in Berlin and London in 2021

Timeline

Submission deadline: 15 March, 2pm CET
Announcement of results: 31 March 

For further information, click here.