WHEN WE ENCOUNTER THE WORLD
16mm, 11 minutes, color/b&w, sound, Portugal/USA, 2023
In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.
This film revisits the remains of the Automeris Project and recreates one such film made using the few remaining assembly notes.
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Co-directed with Zazie Ray-Trapido
Sound Mixing: Andrew Kim
Supported by Galeria Mola & CalArts Film/Video Project Grant -
FESTIVALS:
World Premiere: Curtas Vila do Conde [Experimental Competition]; Vila do Conde, Portugal 2023
International Premiere: New York Film Festival [Currents]; New York, USA 2023
- Maysles Documentary Center; NYFF, New York, USA 2023
- Viennale; Vienna, Austria 2023
- San Diego Underground Film Festival; San Diego, USA 2023
- Glasgow Short Film Festival [Bill Douglas Intl. Short Film Competition]; Glasgow, Scotland 2024
- Athens International Film and Video Festival; Athens, USA 2024
- Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival; Iowa City, USA 2024
- Festival ECRÃ; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2024
- CROSSROADS: SF Cinematheque; San Francisco, USA 2024
- Tacoma Film Festival; Tacoma, USA 2024
- Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival; Bucharest, Romania 2024
- Antimatter [Media Art]; Victoria, BC, Canada 2024
- Festival Intl. de Cine Contemporáneo Cámara Lúcida; Cuenca, Ecuador 2024
- Beijing International Short Film Festival Film; Beijing, China 2024SHOWS & OTHER SCREENINGS
- When We Encounter the World: The Expanded Environment - installed at Galeria Mola; Braga, Portugal 2023/24
- REDCAT: Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater; Los Angeles, USA 2024
- Artist Talk at University of Virginia; Charlottesville, USA 2024 -
In 1934, the “Automeris Project,” named after a moth, began: a group of children isolated in a forest learned about the outside world only through indoctrination films made by two amateur scientists with the aim of providing positive impulses represented American achievements in civilization. Pirondi and Ray-Trapido recapitulate the traces of the project and reconstruct one of these idiosyncratic educational films based on surviving recordings. However, this may not be the whole truth... — Bernd Brehmer
“In 1934, an amateur scientist couple carried out an experiment on what constitutes utopia, whereby children were left alone in a forest with no external input. Periodically, the couple visited to show them artisanal, non-narrative films of their own making, seeking to transform the children’s vision. WHEN WE ENCOUNTER THE WORLD repurposes the term “experimental” in responding to the traces of this scientific investigation. Research logs and abandoned child-like structures amid lush landscapes pave the way to an ecstatic ending of associative images that are based on scientists’ filmmaking notes.” — Salvador Amores
A quick search for the Automeris moth — the name used by the two amateur scientists in the film to refer to their experiment on a colony of children isolated from the real world — will reveal a creature displaying the pattern of what looks like eyes, each wing mirroring each other. When We Encounter the World is as much about the folly of knowledge and the bizarre couple’s utopian dreams as it is about the act of seeing and the idea of image as mediator: not always a true mediator, not always an innocent one. Leonardo Pirondi and Zazie Ray-Trapido’s montage of (uncertain) archival footage and newer images blends into itself, mixing the real with the fictional and creating an unexpected take on the Platonic allegory of the cave. With the duo replicating the same process as the scientists, that is, now depicting the world to us, the question arises: are we on the outside or are we inside the cave? — Dora Leu
“A managed colony of children are brought up in isolation from the modernising world of the 1930s, their only experience of it mediated by a diet of experimental montage film. Archival footage mixes with reconstructions of these impressionistic city symphonies, created to study the effects on their social psyche. If immediately afterwards you are seized with curiosity to learn more, you’ll find the internet no help: no accessible record of the so-called Automeris project exists. With When We Encounter The World, Leonardo Pirondi continues his exploration of the nature of reality and perception this time alongside co-director Zazie-Ray Trapido, whose unreliable narration channels the voice of scientific authority. It conjures something akin to a speculative documentary, a generic decision that further unsettles our sense of real and unreal. Even the name of the purported project, Automeris, comes from a species of moth distinctive for the eye-mimicking pattern of its wings. It suggests a hall-of-mirrors where we can be just as deceived by the eyes of the other as much as our own. But for all its social and metaphysical concerns, the film confidently evades dryness. Its hyper-Eisensteinian conceit is executed with a heavy dose of hauntological humour, and lush visuals which glow with obvious affection for the cinematic language it inherits.” — Oisín Kealy
