Terrestrial Act

A collaborative artist film, Terrestrial Act evokes a future-past landscape through the sculptures of six artists. Spotlit scenery comes alive within an empty theatre, hinting at processes of extractive capitalism and human interference within the natural world. The focus shifts between past and present, staged and unstaged, and organic and fabricated, to explore what it means to animate supposedly inanimate matter, and begin dissolving hierarchical classifications of life forms. Playing upon the traditions of landscape set design and painting, the film explores the history of the romanticisation of nature: framed, reduced and pacified through an anthropocentric and Western perspective.

Terrestrial Act explores these questions at a crucial time to coincide with UN Climate Talks COP26, in Glasgow, seen as our last chance to minimise the already-felt impacts of global warming upon humans and more-than-humans.

Supported by Arts Council England

In partnership with Theatre Royal Newcastle and The NewBridge Project

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