29.04.26 CARING ACROSS SPECIES: EXPANDED CINEMA AT THE ZURICH VOLIERE WITH L’ÎLE AUX OISEAUX

What forms of care emerge when humans and animals share vulnerability?

The continuity between human and animal is one of the threads guiding an experience we carried out at the Voliere Zurich. Moving between the Zurich Voliere and Maya Kosa and Sergio da Costa’s L’île aux oiseaux, the expanded cinema experience opened questions around rewilding, repair, and the fragile continuity between human and more-than-human worlds. The event was curated by Giuseppe Di Salvatore (Filmexplorer) for the students from the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, under the supervision of Fabienne Liptay, who collaborated in the organisation of the expanded cinema experience.

The format of this expanded cinema experience consists precisely in expanding the cinematic experience of a film and its interaction with physical public space. It explores this interaction between the imagination emerging from the film and its expansion to a specific place in the urban or natural landscape. The visit to the Voliere, which preceded the film experience, mainly focused on human goodwill towards animals, within a logic of care and reparation.

After watching the film — whose strength largely relies on its original combination of gentleness and roughness in depicting the violence involved in care practices (for example, the systematic killing of mice in order to feed the birds) — the discussion centred primarily on the real necessity of such violence. More generally, does showing the violence of nature indirectly reinforce anthropocentric exceptionalism or, on the contrary, remind us that nature is not an idealised alternative to human cruelty?

Both in the questions raised by the film and the visit, and in the way we discussed them, dialogue, responsiveness, and the importance of listening emerged as central attitudes for delicate topics such as rewilding, the violence of care, or the continuity between the human and the more-than-human.

Text by Giuseppe Di Salvatore

The expanded cinema event is part of a series of Filmexplorer’s projects and special events that perform expanded cinema.