Caring Across Species: Expanded Cinema at the Zurich Voliere with «L’Île aux Oiseaux»

The format

The format of this expanded cinema experience consists precisely in expanding the cinematic experience of a film and its interaction with physical public space. We explore this interaction between the imagination emerging from the black box and the discovery of a specific place in the urban or natural landscape. Projecting the film experience out of the black box through public discussion, or bringing the experience of physical space into the film: both directions make the phenomenology of film and space explicit.

The experience

Antonin is the only actor in Maya Kosa and Sergio da Costa’s L’île aux oiseaux, but he plays himself (Antonin Ivanidze) as a fragile person training for a job in a bird hospital near Geneva — and near its airport. Between Antonin and the birds, there is an interspecies sympathy, a resonance, as they share a similar therapeutic path.
The continuity between human and animal is one of the threads guiding an experience we carried out at the Voliere Zurich together with students from the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, under the supervision of Fabienne Liptay, who collaborated in the organisation of the expanded cinema experience. We discovered this oasis of care, which is far removed from the old-fashioned spectacular and/or didactic attitude of zoos. Nestled near the Arboretum, the Voliere is an almost invisible island, yet surprisingly loud inside, as if balancing the noise of the nearby car traffic.

Marc Stähli’s generous explanations of the function and activities of the Voliere anticipated our reflections on how animals living in an urban context become indicators of the environment — and of its transformations. The visit to the Voliere, which preceded the film experience, mainly focused on human goodwill towards animals, within a logic of care and reparation.

After watching the film — whose strength largely relies on its original combination of gentleness and roughness in depicting the violence involved in care practices (for example, the systematic killing of mice in order to feed the birds) — the discussion centred primarily on the real necessity of such violence. More generally, does showing the violence of nature indirectly reinforce anthropocentric exceptionalism or, on the contrary, remind us that nature is not an idealised alternative to human cruelty?

Further reflections

The film and the visit to the Voliere encouraged us to question any neat distinction between humans and nature. Different strategies and attitudes can embody a more nuanced organic understanding of the relationship between humans, other living beings, and the environment.

A series of distinctions between key notions helped situate the expanded cinema experience within the broader context of environmental debate: when facing environmental trauma, reparation as a form of remedy may constitute a positivist response that differs significantly from reparation through compensation. The latter idea may lead to restoration, sometimes through various forms of nostalgia for an (often idealised and anti-modern) golden age of environmental harmony. The widely debated notion of rewilding can be interpreted in terms of restoration. Alternatively, it may also take the form of rehabilitation or, with a stronger openness towards transformative scenarios, re-habitation may imply re-adaptation or even retreat. This series of distinctions provided a way of giving our experience an articulated and nuanced form.

Both in the questions raised by the film and the visit, and in the way we discussed them, dialogue, responsiveness, and the importance of listening emerged as central attitudes for delicate topics such as rewilding, the violence of care, or the continuity between the human and the more-than-human.