During the summer of 2020, pictures of a naked sunbather chasing a team of wild boars across a lakeside beach in Berlin spread rapidly online. With the sunbather’s laptop in its mouth, the hastily captured smartphone images helped reinforce the myth of the boar as a troublesome animal. A wild animal that refuses to stay in the wild.

Exploring confrontation and the relations between human and non-human, Brès questions anthropocentric fictions of ‘Nature’ that make our existence within an interconnected ecology hard to recognise. Constructing a non-human world in which wild boars are the primary protagonists, this experimental fiction artwork uses quantitative ecology tools to help guide its script – including geospatial mapping systems and a team of algorithmically animated boars. Manipulating data points, Brès uses mapping as a tool to open up new prospects for alliances between human and non-human. Sitting somewhere between the real and virtual, the world she constructs helps us imagine alternate ways of seeing the world, confronting prevailing anthropocentric philosophies towards a speculation for a communism of the living.

Manifesting as a mixed-media installation within the transmediale studio, notes for les sanglières takes the form of an artist exchange and performance piece. Traversing the borders between artistic production, research and exhibition, the work builds towards the production of Brès’ new film to be shown at a future edition of transmediale.

Elsa Brès is an artist trained as an architect. Her films and installations combine researches, narratives and experimentations, and focus on construction processes and forces of resistance in contemporary landscapes. She lives in the French rural region les Cévennes.