On March 16, 2026, e-flux Screening Room presented “Viscosities,” a program of moving-image works by Lucy Beech. The screening was followed by a conversation between the artist, Lukas Brasiskis, and the audience. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication.
Question: Lucy, I want to start by asking about two terms you have brought up in relation to your practice: accumulation and viscosity. Could you say more about these terms and what they help you think through while making your work?
Lucy Beech: My approach to filmmaking is quite choreographic, and in many of the works we saw this evening I recognize the influence of choreographers like Trisha Brown. Accumulation is the name of a performance she made in 1971, which is based on a simple, additive structure in which a gesture is repeated and incrementally joined by new movements. This method of building complex, evolving sequences through steady accumulation has been part of my approach to a series of recent films. In parallel, I’m quite interested in strategic uses of friction and how this has historical associations with power. “Viscosity,” in that sense, has become a tool for me to think about resistance, not just in an approach to language and poetry, but in how materials, ideas, and emotions move.
Q: Could we talk about viscosity in relation to your film Flush, which seems to share some images with A Map of the Pit? How do you see the relationship between these works?
LB: A Map of the Pit (2025) was actually made from unused materials from my film Flush (2023). When James Richards and I started working on it, we were sharing our archives. That is something I tend to do quite a lot, as I am interested in this kind of accumulation.
Flush came out of work I was doing with a historian of science during a residency at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. We were looking at the history of endocrinology and specifically the study of a biological phenomenon in cows called freemartinism. Viscosity became a visual and sensory framework for shooting flows of materials on farms and in medical labs, which you see throughout the film, but it was also a way to think about the freemartin as a research subject that defied categorization. Freemartins are cows born intersex due to hormone exchange across a shared placenta with a male twin. Eugenicists in the US and Europe studied these hormonal exchanges to understand how sex is formed in the human body, with the broader aim of controlling reproduction and defining sex and gender. I was interested in how freemartins never really behaved the way scientists expected them to, and that resistance is what made these animals such prolific research subjects.
Q: Your films keep returning to images of sewage systems and other kind of industrial interiors that are often edited together with biological or medical images, exposing circulation of fluids that are not usually visible by the naked eye. How did your interest in these inaccessible infrastructures develop?
LB: For example, in Out of Body (2025), my film currently on view at the New Museum, I used imaging technologies that allow for more-than-human perspectives, such as robot cameras, MRI, LiDAR scanners, and cameras mounted on moving infrastructure. The project follows flows of materials across species boundaries, in particular the circulation of urine-derived pharmaceuticals, specifically hCG, a hormone collected from the urine of pregnant humans and animals and used in IVF. In the Netherlands, this is organized through the program Moeders voor Moeders (Mothers for Mothers), an altruistic donation program.
For years, I tried to access the processing factory but couldn’t, so, alongside filming in real sites, the film reconstructs these hidden industrial spaces through investigation and speculation. In one scene, the camera enters a urine tank and the image begins to dissolve. That unreality reflects the secrecy surrounding these sites and the larger pharmaceutical and reproductive economies connected to them, including links between human IVF drugs and industrial animal breeding. My work is investigative in that sense. The films become a way of reflecting the difficulty of really coming to terms with these processes.
Q: Given the unusual locations in your films, could you be more specific about how you gain access to places where people do not really want you to be? Tactically and rhetorically, what has worked for you?
LB: It depends on the context. I try to be as honest as I can be. I forge relationships through curiosity and take the time to try to understand someone else’s approach and take seriously what they do.
Q: The tension between documentary or investigative access and fiction seems central to your work. In Warm Decembers (2022), for example, the film focuses on both infrastructures and intimate psychic states. Could you tell us about how that project evolved from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Warm Decembers (1978–87), and how you decided not to make a conventional adaptation?
LB: I discovered Sedgwick’s verse novel a long time ago. In the beginning, I was very interested in the role of animals. But what was also really compelling to me was that Sedgwick published her notes at the end of the poem. In some ways, the notes or waste materials are the best part. The poem embodies the dissonance of illness. Its rhythm mirrors the creative work being picked up and put down over a ten-year period as her creative capacity fluctuated. One thing I found especially compelling was that, in the notes, Sedgwick makes a call to what I think she calls the “emboldened reader,” who might be willing to take the poem and do something with it. I thought: that is me. The film is complex. It was not something where I could easily say, “now fund my feature on this,” because it is very niche. But what it allowed me to do was let go. I played with Sedgwick’s methodology after she had given me license to do so. It was all very organic. I don’t have a neat story about it. I just started to compress these things, and in that compression something opened up for me.
Q: I watched the film and then read the poem afterward, with images from your film in mind, and they seemed to give form to something my imagination needed while reading it.
LB: I think Sedgwick would probably have liked that, because she was always a proponent of things turning into something else.
Q: The final note in the poem is also striking, because Sedgwick seems to embrace the fact that the book is unfinished, almost as if it is supposed to remain that way.
LB: Yes, that is one of the most compelling things. She resisted fixing the work and instead gave space for the unfinished form to live on in her readers.
Q: Warm Decembers was made in collaboration with Cassie Westwood, but every film we watched today is collaborative in some way. You have worked with writers, musicians, scientists, editors, performers, and others. How does collaboration function as a principle of your practice?
LB: Collaboration is a defining characteristic of my work. I find myself most creative when I am working with somebody else. There is a process of feeling something through together that is really exciting. I’ve always been drawn to interdisciplinary or “boundary work.” Ecology has become a big subject for me, as have environmental practices and remediation work, which are so often inherently interdisciplinary.
The first piece I showed this evening is called Gravity and the last is called Ending. These works were developed with coastal engineers and remediation experts. This project follows the rhythm of a fourteen-song album by Lyra Pramuk. I guess you could call these works music videos, although we have not released them that way. I loved the idea of taking a scientific experiment and making it part of the temporality of her live show. It became a strange configuration of Lyra’s music, ecologists, and me. It was fun to do it that way.
A lot of what I am interested in has to do with learning, or observing learning: coming to terms with something and the steps it takes to do so. In observing that learning process, there is space to think about politics, culture, and how knowledge is constructed. If the work is developed through a sharing process, I am able to do that more directly than if I were working autonomously.
Q: When you begin working with an idea, how do you bring other disciplines into the process, especially on the more technical and scientific side?
LB: I am now quite used to approaching scientists, and they tend to be very open and happy to collaborate. I try to tap into the rhythm of their work, which is often quite repetitive and precise, so when I arrive, it can produce a nice response. But it depends on the situation. It is not always the same.
Q: Your films involve so much research, but watching them, I was also struck by how sound- and music-oriented they are. At what stage do you begin thinking about music, or bringing composers into a project?
LB: I work with music from the very beginning. To give an example, I am currently working on a project for the Lyon Biennale with conservationists who are rewilding vulture populations in France. I’ve been filming choreographed feedings that, in this new work, take on a more psychedelic and mythical register: as the vultures digest pathogens and toxins, they escort the souls of the dead to rest. Alchemists viewed vulture digestion as not merely biological but as cosmological. The extreme acidity was interpreted as a kind of chemical fire, signifying spirits descending to consume and transform fixed matter. My conversations with the composer, Ville Haimala, who does all the music for my films, have been about this alchemical resonance of the vulture microbiome. I want the music to embody complex entanglements between synthetic and natural forms. There is so much to say about this new research. I’m very excited about it.
Q: I was curious about the dissemination of your work, especially in relation to the institution of cinema. How do you think about moving between the gallery, cinema, live performance, and a wider public?
LB: I am always coming to terms with this. Every time we do something, there is a new framing question: is the sound architectural, is it a loop, is it an installation, how do the credits feature? I often try to remain nimble when making things, so that the works have the capacity to open out or respond to different contexts. Of course, remaining nimble can also sound a little neoliberal, but it is a reality I have to work with, as I am drawn to working across many different contexts and formats. Working with Lyra, for example, has a completely different rhythm and audience from cinema or academia. When I show with her, there is a wave of interest that feels very different, and I love that. With art exhibitions, responses are slow. So being nomadic is an interesting rhythm for me. I am in the process of making something more cinematic, as I like the idea of returning to narrative in a cinematic way, but I want to continue incorporating these other ways of working and observing real situations choreographically.
Q: Your films feel very cinematic: in the way you edit, frame, and construct the sequences. Could you say more about your personal relationship to cinema and who might be your favorite film directors?
LB: Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an absolute favorite, especially in relation to the work I am making now, where I am thinking a lot about ghosts, grief, death, and mysticism. I really like Leslie Thornton. I think she is amazing, especially in the way she mixes scientific imaging and cinematography. I also like films within films that are about the creative process, like A.K. by Chris Marker. You get to experience all these tensions and tender moments between the cast and crew on the set of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. Then I really like work made by cinematographers like Arthur Jafa and Babette Mangolte. Arthur’s approach to editing, dissonance, and music is mind-blowing, and I’ve thought a lot about Babette’s work in relation to performance on camera and the choreography of a process. Then there is a film I come back to again and again, Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. That film was very inspirational in terms of sound and this deeply embedded point of view. Those are a few references.
Q: Before we finish, I wanted to ask about what you are working on now and where your research is moving.
LB: I’m still really drawn to situations where clear-cut definitions, like organism vs. environment, inside vs. outside, and human vs. non-human, are under pressure. More recently, the writing of the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön has shaped how I think about this, especially around death, loss, and decomposition. The way she frames death is close to the idea of the “holobiont” in the sense that death is not the annihilation of something solid and separate but part of a continuum. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about holobionts while working on my film with vulture conservationists. Conceptually, the term “holobiont” describes a host organism together with all the microorganisms living inside or on it. Vultures are holobionts in that they can digest decaying bodies that would kill most animals, and that resilience isn’t just in their genes, it’s triggered by the microbial communities they ingest and host. I keep circling back to this idea of not just being made up of many parts and constantly changing, but being deeply embedded in other forms of life and death.
