A little girl named Lilly plays with paper puppets, reenacting some brief moments from the daily life of tenants in the house she lives in. Brutal and painfully real observations mix with dreamlike scenes which may suggest her future, her past, or none of them.
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(...)"News from Borussia" action is set in a Berlin apartment building through the eyes of a little girl who transforms reality into a puppet show. But it could also be that she creates new realities with her paper figures. The child is an innocent but also cruel god whose world resembles a fairy tale without meaning. 

News from Borussia

Batrachomyomachia is a mid-length experimental feature based on the outcome of the following events:

Hajnówka is a small industrial town, established because of its location near an old-growth forest, which development was based on the timber industry. This industry collapsed with the political transformation in Poland and the granting of UNESCO reserve status to the Bialowieza Forest, which forced the local population to limit their timber harvesting. In 2017, however, as a result of the governmental right-wing politics of the Minister of Environment, Prof. Szyszko, there was a sudden increase in logging in the Forest, which resulted in a socially changing conflict between scientists, conservationists, activists, and foresters/local residents who used to thinking of the forest as a "resource" to be used. The result has been a long-term, class-based social division according to which women, youth, some representatives of the scientific community (biologists), activists, and people "from the cities" (mainly the educated middle and upper classes) assumed the role of hostile invaders against the local population. This population began to use defenses based on the ideology of nativeness, tradition, habitation, reforestation, and other forms of "being in space" and therefore ownership, but without considerable merits of contemporary scientific knowledge concerning the possibilities of passive/active nature protection. This clash of ideologies resulted in a still-ongoing war of mistrust, passive-aggressive behavior, multiple attacks conducted among the opposing social media groups, but also on individuals.

The film sources from the direct rhetorics and logic of social media communication between the representatives and their social groups, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. The script is structured around selected comments from the period of time when the conflict was rising and emotions were peaking. Therefore, the language and composition of the film feel highly staged, unnatural, and idiosyncratic. Characters in the film are inspired by the real, existing characters involved, but they were only outsourced/built using the 'internet' virtual persona, as the owners would prefer to see/or see themselves. The illusion of flatness attached to these secondary characters is contrasted with the strong and silent presence of the leading character, young female Sabina. She is a biology teacher in the local school, a keen observer, and a narrator of the story. The whole story credits also the ancient comic epic, a parody of the Illiad by Homer.




Batrachomyomachia

Hybrids and Humans is a cinematic attempt to question the anthropocentric order, the rules of which determine the fate of non-human beings in a small town surrounded by a dense forest in eastern Poland. The film, currently in production, portrays the worldview of the residents of Bialowieza.  The pretext for a conversation starter becomes a  young she-wolf, who for a few winter months walks the streets of the village, not aware of the consternation that her unusual behavior causes. Following her troops, I roam the streets of Bialowieza and the surrounding forest with my camera, chasing residents whom I ask seemingly innocent, wolf-related questions, in order to find out what they think and how they imagine the contemporary, past, and future role of man in the biosphere of the planet. I specifically focus on the perspectives of and on the local dogs, which represent the dual affiliation - both to the civilized and wild, especially that the she-wolf has a soft spot for them. Meanwhile, she also becomes an object of interests of the whole country, forcing the local mayor and a group of scientists to forge a term "conflict", and stamp permission to "sort it out". This means - to get rid of the problem. Are there any ethical ways to solve the perpetual human-nature clash?


In early Autumn 2020, a young she-wolf appeared in Białowieża, a village near the Belarusian border in the UNESCO protected Białowieża Forest, abandoning her culturally assigned sphere and crossing the unwritten boundaries of between nature-culture, breaking the “law of the jungle.” Her behavior confused and scared the local community and scientists. The wolf plays with dogs. She trespasses. Is she a hybrid – a mix of a wolf and a dog? This would mean crossing the scientific ideas of the purity of the original species. Will she be put in a rehabilitation center? Killed? She will never become “a true wolf”, neither can she stay with us. But why not? What shall we do with her and who should decide about this? What does she even want? This has never happened before. We ask local residents about their encounters with the she-wolf, to later dive into the common psyche of the pulsating, social organism, the contradictory opinions, projections, prejudices, imaginations, and beliefs about the relationship between nature and humans (and nature of humans). Language, having developed evolutionarily from a crave for (explanatory) patterns, is responsible for ideas of “protection”, “revitalization” and care. Listening and observing gestures, we adopt the perspectives of dogs and the forest. Both become translators and witnesses to our “hybrid-human case” on the edge of the forest laboratory. In the meantime, the whole country seems to be under an awkward attack of wolves who seemingly lost their "natural" fear of humans. What is happening? Is fear truly an evolutionary mechanism developed for survival? When is it an advantage and when an obstacle for progress?



Hybrids and humans

"Endlands is a radio play - a space for reflection where you experience a sense of flow, immersing yourself in the sounds and voices collected on the eastern side of Poland.
We contemplatively document moments of transformation, the blending of concepts, states of mind, physical and emotional landscapes. We investigate the relationship between the ecosystem and man, assuming changing perspectives and time parameters.
We look for traces of entropy, accompanying humans, animals, plants, fungi in the processes of awakening and dying of life; creation, and destruction.
While walking unhurriedly through the Endlands, we listen to the pulsating circulation of matter at the junction of nature and culture. We experience the landscape of the end."

In this ongoing project, I have been collecting sounds (field recording) and stories from the variety of people living and working in Podlasie Province in order to capture local ecology in transgression, in a continuous process of transformation and change. The causes behind the processes of entropy are wide: economical, seasonal, political, individual, physical, emotional, and environmental. I talk to people representing both modern, progressive views, as well as those traditionalists, who claim the absolute rule of humans over the ecosystems. I talk to the local scientist, beekeepers, shamans, housewives, farmers, gardeners, forestry workers, all sorts of people in relation to their lives in local nature. When composing the episodes I intertwine their voices with sounds: human and nature-produced, creating long melodic compositions that together tell a story of periodicity, undulations, permeations. My goal is to build a whimsical archive, documentation of disappearance, decay, and hope. Sounds structures in each episode are supposed to give pleasure to the listeners, even in the moments when they seem opressive. 

Endlands

The work was realized over the following 3 days, every day for exactly 6 hours, in the building of the former hydroelectric power plant in Bialystok. Using the architecture and topography of the existing space, its peculiarities, scars, character -  the whole "body" of the building, and treating it as such, (choreography and scenography)  a specific ritual of purification, refrigeration was staged. By means of subtly and precisely arranged actions and interferences (e.g. using the smell emitted by the wooden floor in the main hall, which for years absorbed the oils driving the mechanism of the power plant, and mixing it with a very strong scent of cut lilies, working with light, emphasizing the structural elements of the interior, and the acoustics of the building and its dimensions), we managed to wake up to life an oneiric organism, in which the planes of individual and collective experience intersected. Each of the female performers was assigned a specific role and stayed in a closed fragment of space, however, their rituals and gestures took place in time synchronization based on sound signals (drowned audio tracks, voice signals, mechanical sounds). Guest-participant through his/her active presence and decisions (to be an active or passive participant; which routes to choose), co-created the atmosphere of the common, shared „body”, and relieved his/ hers own tensions, expectations and habits.

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Kasia Hertz