Kim Laybourn


The Animate Landscape

Ingenlunde Hellig

Sorry for Calling you an Inanimate Object

The Significant Other

Det Bevidste Landskab

Morphologies

Window of Otherworldly Delights


CV

Info

The Animate Landscape


3D animation video
duration 23,27 min.
2023/2024


The Animate Landscape takes its point of departure from the plant kingdom and depicts an anthropomorphic nature, a humanized landscape, that seeks to challenge our awareness of plants; how we experience and relate to plants. Their uniform green color, their lack of movement, and their faceless bodies, offer limited anthropomorphic possibilities, and make them so alien to us, that it affects how we cognitively perceive them as insignificant and inferior. And the way in which plants grow mixed together in clusters, creates spatial continuity for the human eye, i.e. landscapes, and for that reason, they are only considered little more than homogeneous surroundings by which we can navigate and orientate ourselves. 

In The Animate Landscape, the nature makes itself known, and behaves differently, than what one is to expect from plants. Instead of being passive, almost lifeless inanimate objects, as they are usual regarded, the plants are acting wild, wilful, and person-like. Expressing themselves loudly, with voices of cacophonous leaves and branches, and embarking on free dance and erratic movements. It is a nature in revolt, bursting with frantic and rebellious energy. The film present nature as a subject and an active participant. Bringing it to the fore, placed in focus, rather than being set aside as a background, a decorative backdrop for human actors.

 

Produced with support by
Danish Arts Foundation
The Audio and Visual Fund
Arts and Culture Norway
Norwegian Visual Artists Fund