Becoming-with Donkeyness

As an environmental humanist, I grab a camera to mediate the world around me. The short film LAND/SCAPE (2020), cocreated by two donkeys (Dondolo and Giorgiana), fellow PhD candidate Giulia Lepori, and me, was filmed on the Mediterranean island of Sicily in the Valley of Sagana. As part of our doctoral projects, we were involved in managing the land in that valley and in undertaking caring performances among this lively meshwork. Simona Trecarichi and Danilo Colomela, the two permaculture designers behind this project, have been redesigning their landscape over the past fifteen years. In walking through the paths paved by the donkeys Dondolo and Giorgiana, I was slowly understanding other-than-human relations in the biome. I was becoming-with donkeys in their becoming-with land. Through my experimental aesthetic intervention in mediating the donkeys’ becoming-with land, I strapped the camera to Dondolo. In this article, I combine ethnographic multispecies vignettes from my fieldwork with my artist’s statement about my practice. I reflect upon cinema’s unique affinity with the Anthropocene—that double bind between the media and nature—and how the biogeomorphic qualities found in the film diffract the world back to us, enabling the viewers to feel the cinematic land affect. This is not the filmmaker’s gaze nor his story. It is a film world’s landsoundscape filled with more-than-human bodies; as such, this story belongs to the land and the earth others. Please watch the film LAND/SCAPE first, and only then engage with the written word.