C R E A T U R E C A T A L O G U E
Naturalisation (I)
Short film experiment 4’13 (2023)
An array of still lifes with trinkets and taxidermy is presented, like a museum inventory (or the frames of a film). A woman with skilful hands displays a mounted Eurasian wigeon in flight, then the animals come to life: a chicken, a lazy cat, a small nervous dog, then a photo of the dog’s kin next to an urn with its ashes. A catalogue of finds from an expedition to an unknown place or the inventory of someone’s life? A man is presented, then the woman reappears. Are they the holders of this collection—or themselves being collected?
Creature Catalogue — Naturalisation (I) is an experimental short tracing dormant intersections between taxidermy, culture of remembrance, and ethnographic documentary film.
Screening & exhibition history
2023 Labocine (curated platform for “film from the science new wave”) november issue “Reviving the Extinct”
2023 Kunstrum Fyn
Imprint
Director
PETER HAMMER
Director of photography
JACOB SOFUSSEN DFF
Editor
ANDERS VILLADSEN
Composer
LARS GREVE — Resonating Rooms
Creatures
SUSIE BALTZERSEN — Re-Fauna
CREATURE CATALOGUE — NATURALISATION (I) is a preliminary study made during the development of the documentary feature REVIR produced by Vibeke Vogel/Bullitt FIlm with support from New Danish Screen under the Danish Film Institute
Lifelike
Creature Catalogue — Naturalisation (I) is part of an ongoing artistic research interrogating a shared heritage between documentary filmmaking and taxidermy. It is a an experimental short cataloguing an inventory of lives lived, ended and reanimated at the location of a documentary film.
Each of its finds is displayed to interrogate the relation of perception between lifeless, lifelike and alive, between creature and creator, between animal and human, between taxidermist and filmmaker who are equally preoccupied with questions of collecting, preserving, staging and (re)presenting realities.
Both taxidermy and documentary filmmaking are practices obsessed with collecting and staging realities and with questions of representation, realism, naturalism. They share a common ancestry as well as fundamental problems relating to those same issues historically as well as in the present.
Naturalisation here means a) consignation into archive, b) adaptation of a species to a region where it is not indigenous, and c) the act of causing something to appear natural.
Creature Catalogue is a preliminary study-come-work unto itself for the development of the feature documentary REVIR—Everything You Hold Dear (2023).