SITUATED ECOLOGIES gathers art, design and research collaborations to contest and democratise ecologies.

Killing Aliens Everyday

Killing Aliens Everyday: Otherness as Constitutive of an Organized Inside, A Film-based Experiment. (2016, Short film, 15 min). Press link for screener.

‘The Anthropocene’ is becoming a fetish, an excessive and irrational devotion or commitment to a particular thing—a site to invest all sorts of desires and projections. Our video experiment, which is based on a longer environmental film and pedagogical project with material from Cape Town**, is an experiment in “othernessness”, i.e. an exploration of how ‘the other’ is constructed and employed to constitute an organized inside that contains singular unifying story-lines. And how such attempts of unification always fail. Using film and sound material captured by video cameras mounted on plants that are deemed unwanted, or “aliens”, we are trying to produce an artifact that sees the world from these unwanted plants.

  • Created by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson.
  • First presented at Stories of the Anthropocene Festival (SAL), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 26-29 October 2016, Stockholm.
  • Scholarly reference: von Heland, Jacob and Henrik Ernstson. Killing Aliens Everyday: Otherness as Constitutive of an Organized Inside, A Film-based Experiment. (film, 15min) In: Stories of the Anthropocene Festival (SAL), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 26-29 October 2016, Stockholm
  • For a longer treatment, download this pdf.

The Legend and The Archive

The Legend and The Archive (2016, short film, 10 min). This is an interview with Bradley van Sittert made by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. Photography by Johan von Reybekiel. Press link for screener.

What is and archive and what is history in our postcolonial world? Who has the ability and privilege to put things straight of what happened before? What methods, tools, and artefacts are involved in doing so? This short