Catalonia in Venice—Carlos Casas: Bestiari

Imagine that a group of animals start speaking to you. You had a nap after a stroll in the woods and upon waking up, you realize that you understand what they say. They cry, screak, hiss, hum, buzz, and rumble in ways that you perceive through physical reactions in your body. Your stomach vibrates, you have goosebumps, you see through sound, and you apprehend bodies through temperature. Different animals tell you things strange and familiar, poetic and public, worrisome and comforting, magnificent and banal. They invite you to engage with time differently: to attune yourself to what happens around and within you, to lie down, blurring the distinction between sleep and wakefulness while being surrounded by creaturely sounds and images.

Curated by Filipa Ramos, Bestiari is a hypnagogic installation created by Carlos Casas. It features visual and audio footage captured in the natural parks of Catalonia in collaboration with field recordist Chris Watson and sound spatialialist Tony Myatt. The physical, interspecies aspects of sound and sight are revealed through tones and wavelengths that are rarely heard and seen, from infrasounds to ultrasounds, to the representation of the color specters of animal vision.

Bestiari unsettles the boundaries of art, cinema, and nature recording, inducing corporeal modes of interspecies encounter. Listening and seeing become practices of imagination as much as of perception. Seven animals from Catalonia and beyond—bats, bees, dolphins, donkeys, elephants, parrots, and snakes—are made present by a spatial sound diffusion technology that reproduces their specific sound frequencies and establishes areas for immersive listening. The film adopts an animal perspective derived from each animal's spectrum of vision, inviting visitors into their different sensorial apparatuses.

Bestiari is inspired by a medieval text written in 1417 by Anselm Turmeda, one of the founders of Catalan literature. His story Disputa de l'ase (Dispute of the Donkey), narrates a court case taken by a group of animals against a friar who has “preached over 100 times that the children of Adam are more noble, excellent and of greater dignity than (...) animals”. Tired of being deemed inferior, the animals choose a spokesperson, a long-tailed donkey, who faces the friar in court. The result is a fantastic narrative whose contradictions reveal the ideologies, paradigms, and identities that continue to shape western’s relationship to the natural world.

For more than twenty years, artist and filmmaker Carlos Casas has been engaging with the artistic traditions of documentary cinema, creating films, installations, sound pieces, and aural environments that trigger new perceptive experiences and generate cross-cultural and inter-species encounters. Proposing new connections to the environment, he has a longstanding interest in understanding the role of sonic reverberations in preserving environments under threat of extinction. In his work, humans, animals, and places testify forms of mundane or radical existence and co-habitation, offering respectful forms of looking and listening that bring viewers closer to their subjects while interrogating their own means. In his films and installations, thoughts and affects collapse through corporeal adjustments to the featured landscapes and their inhabitants. Inspired by pioneering sonic explorations. Having collaborated with musicians such as David Toop or Phill Niblock, Casas's work has been widely shown, namely at the Venice and Shanghai Biennales, at the Venice, Rotterdam and Mexico Film Festivals, and he has exhibited and performed at the Tate Modern, Fondation Cartier, Centre Pompidou, NTUCCA Singapore, HangarBicocca, CCCB Barcelona or Kunsten Festival des Arts.

Sharing the sonic realm of the natural parcs of Catalonia, Bestiari is an invitation to embrace the otherness within ourselves: to become other, not by mimicking otherness but by experiencing what it means to exist as someone else through a profound sensorial transformation.

The Institut Ramon Llull is a public consortium responsible for promoting Catalan language and culture internationally. It produces and organises the participation of Catalan culture in the Collateral Events of the International Art Exhibition—the Venice Biennale since 2009.

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