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LICHENS ARE THE WAY

2024, color, 43 min., 16 mm > 4K video

Film that listens to lichens and, through them, to a world where life is not an individual, but a relation.

Poster for the film Lichens Are the Way

Lichens Are The Way is a film that approaches lichens not as objects of study, but as a way of thinking.

Lichens are not one organism. They are a coexistence of fungus and algae, a shared body. The film stays with this simple fact long enough for it to begin to shift perception. What appears at first as a marginal form of life slowly becomes a model: life as relation, as contact, as a surface where different beings meet and hold together.

Shot on 16mm, the film follows the material conditions of its subject. It proceeds slowly, through attention rather than explanation. Images are not used to illustrate, but to register. Time is not compressed, but allowed to accumulate.

Conversations with lichenologists unfold without urgency. Knowledge appears as something lived, not delivered. What emerges is not a thesis, but a change of scale.

The film does not argue that lichens should be imitated. It simply stays with them long enough to ask:

what if life is not something that is,
but something that happens between.

Trailer

Producer: D1film

Distributor: Kinorebelde

The project was selected on dok.incubator.

Film presented at (selection):

Original lithograph related to Lichens Are the Way, edition of 111

Original lithograph, edition of 111

Related exhibitions: