Enkel met jagers hebben we cinema

Joeri Verbesselt's doctoral research in the Arts delves into cinema's potential as an experimental medium to explore and experience how we can imagine futures that help address global ecological challenges. Verbesselt presents this research in the form of a film and a written dissertation. The experimental documentary film Only with hunters do we have wild animals (2024, 34') reflects the triangular relationship between Verbesselt's position as a Belgian filmmaker and outside visitor, the Indigenous Tao and Truku people of the Pacific islands of Pongso no Tao and Taiwan, with whom he has developed a relationship over the years, and the animals he has come to know more deeply through these people. The film juxtaposes different temporalities to aim for an audiovisual progression from the settler colonial industrial destructions of lifeworlds to the Indigenous resurgence of the Truku's Gaya (sacred law) and the Tao's oceanic ontology, both fostered through the intergenerationally transmitted practice of hunting with ethical responsibilities to living members of one's community, Ancestors, other communities and animals. The textual part of Verbesselt's doctorate, titled Only with hunters do we have cinema, resounds the inextricable relation between land, Indigenous hunters and wild animals as the ethical constitution of a cinema that seeks to be aware of the global reverberations of our present increasing ecological precariousness. This dissertation consists of both a discursive articulation of Verbesselt's filmmaking process and a reflection and analysis of the context surrounding its making. This context involves textual sources, personal conversations, dreams, images, artworks, movies, and other materials. Because of the inter- and transdisciplinary specificity of Verbesselt's research trajectory, in which he sought a way through the complex themes that concerned its central intersections—ecological issues, Indigenous resurgence and international solidarity, human-animal relations, audiovisual care, etc.—his writing took various shapes during different stages of his research journey. This results in a hybrid dissertation in which art historical methods, such as iconology and art criticism, appear alongside more experimental approaches to writing, including photo-text, autobiography, automatic writing, fiction, and poetry.