Microbial Land II - Raechel Teitelbaum
Curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen, in collaboration with Loop City Screen Festival 2020.
November 10th - 22nd, Tangent Projects website.
Microbial Land II is an experimental video work that utilises layering techniques, combining 3D video animation and live-action footage with poetry, to illustrate a new imagined world and ecological hierarchy that plays with ideas of queer ecologies and interconnection.
This work is partly inspired by the ecological model that the current pandemic imagines. It enlarges the role of the particle - falling in line with Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘inner space’ and the ‘realm of the infinitesimal’ - and magnifies the micro.
“Using microscope videos of soil bacteria from the Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, collected by Hari Byles, I emphasize the microbial sphere of life by exploring ideas surrounding the concept of scale. This bacterial footage is then UV mapped onto 3D landscapes as rotating planets in this virtual world, shifting in scale and material.
Superimposed onto this 3D world, is the raw footage of the bacteria as well as live-action footage of two gender variant people - who identify as transgender and non-binary. Their eyes are covered by neon tape, and their genitals outlined, as they experience an intimate connection while moving around in this landscape together.”
This piece calls into question various norms and hierarchies, which includes vision. In taking away their sight, it allows for other sensory organs and diverse forms of connection to be amplified, thus shifting our perception and subjective experience of the world, with the aim to formulate new ecologies, alignments and societal norms.
In questioning these ecological and societal norms, I am inherently working with ideas of queer ecologies, maintaining that nature is inherently queer, and tying together queer ecological realms and politics.
Affine 12 - Microbial Land II was a follow up to Affine 11 - COMPUTER MASK 1, a previous online project with Raechel Teitelbaum in August 2020. The Microbial Land II video is a single component of a much larger installation that will be exhibited in Tangent Projects gallery in 2021.
Raechel Teitelbaum (they/she) is a visual artist born in Syracuse, New York, currently based in London, working primarily with video, installation, performance, textile, and poetry. They studied in both Spain and the United States for their undergraduate degree - graduating from Purchase College with a bachelor's degree in 'Media, Society, and the Arts’, an interdisciplinary program that combined fine arts, anthropology, and media studies in 2017. Following this, Raechel attended Metáfora Studio Arts Programs in Barcelona, where they completed an advanced studio arts diploma in 2019. They just completed a Master of Arts in Digital Media: Image Making at Goldsmiths, University of London where they focused on 3D video animation, processing, and coding.
Raechel has exhibited at a variety of a galleries in Barcelona including Homesession, Bien Cuadrado, and Ángels Barcelona Espai 2 along with exhibitions in Berlin and New York. They are currently attending Goldsmiths, University of London, where they are enrolled in a PhD program for Visual Anthropology.