Progress vs Sunsets - Re-formulating the Nature Documentary (2017)
Can we send ‘funny’ animal videos into space for aliens to discover the
Earth’s ecosystem?
This and other questions are the ones that bonajo investigates for the second part of their trilogy, Progress vs. Sunsets (2017), a trilogy examining extinction or endangerment of vulnerable groups through techno-capital development, but also extinction in an abstract sense, extinction of feelings and thought forms.
It seems our culture is tone deaf to the non-human world. How does animal representation online influence the prolonging of a species life in the “wild” or in captivity? Paying attention to the animal online tells us something about our own species future, about who is protected on this planet and who is not.
The lives of non-human animals and their online representation is closely interwoven and that is why the symbol of the animal has drastically changed over the past couple of years. The film “Progress vs. Sunsets” illustrates how our relationship to nature has changed through the popularization of amateur-nature photography and film on the Internet. This is shown through the eyes and voice of children, the next generation, who seem to pinpoint and address easily the complicated issues around animal rights, bio-politics, dwindling resources, ecology, anthropomorphism in which Nature, as the ultimate other is seen as a utilitarian object outside of ourselves and the implications these ethics have on human desires, emotions,
emotiveness and sentimentality towards “the others”.
On another level the film addresses how adults often prejudice and accompany systematic discrimination against young people, applying an adult model of thinking and being on a young child caused by a fear to the child’s view of self that trades on rejecting and excluding child-subjectivity, or magical non-dualistic way of thinking, which has always been excluded of Western thinking. This view holds that compassion depends on emotions, and that emotions lead to attachments. These emotions and attachments are traditionally perceived as irrational leading to vulnerability and consequent suffering within a state of acknowledging interrelatedness. This film
points out the opposite. Affective connections, including empathy and compassion, have a rational and practical component and which if devaluated justify oppression and distorts our relationship to each other, with the earth and other animals and consequently our own survival as a species.