ORCHID, BEE AND I
Orchid, Bee and I (OBI) documents one day in 2049, where a Person, an Orchid and a Bee Balloon spend Christmas Day together as a household.
The film is an invitation to engage this fictional diary as anthropologists who enter a familiar yet strange world to uncover its constitutive mechanisms. We call this approach Speculative Anthropology.
Conceived during Christmas 2020 at the peak of the COVID pandemic in the U.K, the slow unfolding of this project has become our self-reflexive journey to cope with—and make sense of—what is happening around us. It draws on our observation, frustration, fear and hope, while delving into the paradoxes of protection, isolation, care, intimacy, and the deeply-held human desire for companionship with other species on a damaged planet.
Developed in collaboration with fellow artists, designers, researchers and filmmakers, OBI highlights world-building as a shared practice and encourages imaginative rethinking of the present realities through the projected near-future scenarios.
LINKS
‘Orchid, Bee and I’
KoozArch column: Living with Precarity: #3 Speculative Anthropology, 2022
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The project received funding from the Elephant Trust (2023), and is an ongoing collective endeavour with many friends and collaborators:
Co-Producer: Laura Belinky
Cinematography: Keidrych Wasley
Movement design: Mira Hirtz
Bio prop design: Clara Acioli
Food prop design: Orlando Lovell
Mask design: Vicky Wright
Sound design: Alonso Esquinca & Ke Guo
Music score: Robert Gerard Pietrusko
Researcher: Agata Nguyen Chuong