Cosmologies of the living forest: For a metabolic documentary

This article traces Swiss researcher and video artist Ursula Biemann’s use of sound and image in her video works Forest Law (Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, 2014) and Forest Mind (Ursula Biemann, 2021) to understand their aesthetic and epistemic envisioning as a plea for a metabolic documentary. Biemann films with the Indigenous people of Kichwa and Inga (territories of Ecuador and Colombia) who participate in international conferences and workshops on ecopolitics. With the aim of creating through aesthetic practice “new neural synapses that stimulate a more interconnected worldview” through aesthetic practice, these projects encounter Indigenous cosmologies from Latin America. By focussing on how disparate cosmologies are confronted with one another in Biemann’s videos, the article analyses the aesthetic and epistemological ways in which the interconnection of all life is portrayed: while Forest Law observes the hegemonic history of Indigenous knowledge production being suppressed by the Global North, Forest Mind excavates the converging aspects between the Inga’s cosmology and contemporary neuroscience. Reading Biemann’s metabolic documentary as ecocentric cinema, the article outlines the potential of this filmic practice for epistemic justice in the Amazon.