✦ The Realm of Things
✦ The Animate Landscape
✦ Phytomorphic Phantasies
✦ The Significant Other
✦ Det Bevidste Landskab
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Info
The Animate Landscape
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.
The film is hand-animated, without any use of generative AI. All the natural environments in the film, are 3D scans, arranged in designed landscapes and animated individually. The soundscape is created from scratch with foley techniques, performed with collected plant material, leaves, stems and branches, to match the sounds of the movements of thousands of plants in the film.
3D animation video.
4k digital CGI-video.
96000HZ stereo sound.
Duration 23,27 min.
2023.
No generative artificial intellegence (AI) was used in the creation of this work.
Acknowledgements
Produced with support by
Danish Arts Foundation,
The Audio and Visual Fund,
Arts and Culture Norway,
Norwegian Visual Artists Fund.
Video excerpt from The Animate Landscape, depicting a small beech tree sprout acting as if it is a bird. 2023.
Installation view of The Animate Landscape at Malva, Lahti Museum of Visual Arts, as part of the group exhibition Symbiosis. 2026.
>>You become calm and happy by watching this approximately 20-minute long sequence where nature becomes possessed by a force that moves through the landscape. Kim Laybourn has a special eye for the contrast between nature and man's ability to make the natural unnatural. He himself takes nature in his grasp, lets it pass through his hands, to release it in a freer and more whimsical form than before. Sublime.<<
- Karin Frid, The Gothenburg Post.
Video excerpt from The Animate Landscape, depicting a touch-me-not acting out. 2023.
>>It's as if we get to observe the forest for a day when no one else is. Maybe this is how it behaves then. At sunrise, the plants begin to move, dance. They do dramatic pirouettes and crouch. Others swing more like for themselves. Some stand in a communal sea of slow qigong. Dandelion balls move like in a frenzy. The party goes on until darkness falls and dull leaves seem to clap their hands in thanks for the day's performance before the night's rest takes over.<<
- Karin Frid, The Gothenburg Post.
Video excerpt from The Animate Landscape, depicting a ground elder performing a ballet-like dance. 2023.
Installation view of The Animate Landscape at Gallery Box, as part of the solo exhibition Phytomorphic Phantasies. 2024.
Video excerpt from The Animate Landscape, depicting a small group of dancing nettles. 2023.
Installation view of The Animate Landscape at Gallery F-15 as part of the group exhibition Abundance, The 46th edition of Tendenser biennial. 2023.
Video excerpt from The Animate Landscape, depicting blowball dandelions going amok, making pappus fly everywhere. 2023.