Can you share with us how did you first encounter the lichens and the two human protagonists of the film? How did you work with them in the shooting?
Since I have strong affinity towards detail, close-up looking, I met lichens in my very childhood. I watched them and my gaze shrank me to such a minuscule size, that I could walk in the monumental landscapes of other planets and listn to fantastic stories they were telling me. The encounter with the two lichenologist, Trevor Goward and Curtis Randall Björk captured in the film helped me to me realize one thing. As a child I was partly wrong. Despite the fantastic look of the lichen landscapes they do not belong to other planet and they do tell some extravagant other story. It is but directly opposite. They are the very form of this planet and the story they tell is the biggest story of the Earth. That is a story of life.
The film is constructed through a series of impressive fixed shots, in which natural and human elements are merged in a fluid, continous way. Would you tell us how did you work on the lichens, the landscape and the human figures?
The film is shot on 16mm. We had quite limited amount of raw material. The choice what to shoot was crucial, but not difficult. The „script“ didn’t stem from my personal will but from the story that lichens compose by the shapes of their bodies. Trevor was able to read this story from nature and even his partner did not know about it. The story first appears in our film. Secondly I wanted to map all the basic topoi of the two film protagonists: home, food, animal, work, play etc. In the end we have used all the captured shots. In the final cut we have only chanaged their order and length. As said, lichens could be perceived as mircrocosmos. World of our scale is macrocosmos. We are bigger then them. On the other hand lichens can live thousands year. Their time is much more vast then ours. We are microcosmos in the lichens’ macrocosmos. We enter the a paradox. In this sense the film is a manifestation of my respect to protagonists’ life. Needless to say that it is – as our lives – based on a contradictions.
In the beginning of the film, one of the protagonists reflects upon the silence and the sound of existence. Would you tell us how did you work with the sound elements of the film, the voices of the protagonists and the sounds of the natural environment?
For hearing the sound you need a space and time. The sound resonates through space, in fact it creates that space and you have to have time to listen to that spatial resonance. That was surely one thing Trevor had in mind speaking about silence and sound of existence. Technically the sound in film is based on real ambient recordings with sound effects added. We faced the question how to make sounds of lichens. What does lichen sounds like? Obviously they don’t produce any sound human eye could hear. But as “lichens are the way” for human beings, I wanted to give them a way to us humans in return. So we recorded lot of them as sounds produced using my body. I empathized with them and found out what it would be like to sound like a lichen.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
