This project emerged through a situated encounter with the Lézarde River in Guadeloupe. It unfolded progressively through a cycle of immersion, embodied practices, audiovisual recording, and reflexive analysis through editing.

IMMERSION

The choice of site emerged from constraint. The Lézarde River is accessible through walking rather than driving from my family’s home, a practical condition that shaped the rhythm and duration of encounters.

During repeated visits, encounters occurred with various nonhuman presences created a recurring tension between the desire to identify and categorise species through scientific knowledge - and the possibility that attentive recognition alone might constitute a meaningful relation. This hesitation echoes debates within multispecies ethnography, a field that attempts to decentre human perspectives while acknowledging the limits of human knowledge about other beings. As Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich suggest, multispecies ethnography attends to the entangled lives of humans and other organisms without reducing them solely to scientific objects of classification (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010).

Sensory observations unfolded through practices of perception and embodiment as methodological tools (Pink 2015)with practices of ecosomatic and improvisational dance allowed an exploration of sensing internal and external elements mutually shape one another (Mouvementements, 2023). These practices allowed the body to function both as sensor and expressive medium.

The river also appeared through the languages that describe it. Digital searches revealed that online representations of the Lézarde are framed merely through touristic narratives. At the same time, everyday conversations with relatives and local users of the river generated practical ecological advice: warnings about rainfall in the mountains affecting water levels ; suggestions about where to swim safely ; concerns about pollution or water quality.

These observations allows to an understanding of the river through multiple narrative regimes: scientific knowledge (hydrology, water quality reports), touristic imaginaries, everyday ecological knowledge, personal memories and affects. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes landscapes as assemblages of stories, histories and ecological processes (Tsing 2015). The Lézarde emerges similarly through overlapping narratives rather than a single authoritative description.

FILM-MAKING

The project initially explored the possibility of an expanded cinema approach, in which the camera functions less as a tool of representation and more as an instrument of inquiry. Experimental filmmakers such as Jacques Perconte have explored ways in which digital image processes reveal nonhuman agencies through colour flows, distortions, and transformations. These practices raise the question of whether cinema might allow environments to appear not merely as scenery but as active participants.

The repeated visits and practices of attention allowed the river to appear not as a field of relational processes, understood through the concept of intra-action, where entities do not precede relations but emerge through them (Barad 2007). Observing water, rocks, vegetation, sediment and bodies interacting therefore becomes less a catalogue of elements than an inquiry into their co-constitution.

Material conditions and aesthetic intentions, however, redirected the process. Long-term environmental recording or analog film practices required technical equipment that remained outside the project’s scope. More importantly, many experimental ecological films share a recognizable aesthetic vocabulary that did not fully resonate with the project’s intention. Here, dimensions of beauty, desire and attracation are not necessarily expressions of spectacle but also function as modes of reappropriating ecological attention The film therefore combines observational footage with performative elements.

PERFORMING

Performative gestures emerged as a way to address viewers directly rather than relying solely on observational imagery. These performances were improvised with the river environment as both symbol and partner, where the body to become both a sensor and expressive medium. These performances are not presented as authentic expressions of ecological connection but as critical enactments of cultural narratives, including fantasies of indigeneity, romantic environmentalism, and colonial histories of landscape representation. These practices exploring the choreopolitical dimension of movement, a concept developed by theorist André Lepecki to describe how choreography can expose and challenge social structures governing bodies (Lepecki 2013).

Performing also happened through the process of editing as the meaning-making of the whole process is quite condensed in this phase. The representation of the different narrative regimes was influenced by the plurality and circularity of a carrier bag writing approach **(**Ursula K. le Guin). Furthermore, editing tools of expanded cinema were applied to render the understanding of the river where water, rocks, vegetation, sediment and bodies interacting was less a catalogue of elements than an inquiry into their co-constitution. The storytelling and editing techniques were all designed to share this experience as a relational process, understood through the concept of intra-action, where entities do not precede relations but emerge through them (Barad 2007).

DISTRI-CONTINUATION

The project was produced largely individually. This creates a methodological limitation: the absence of collaborative interpretation during production. The project therefore considers distribution itself as a relational phase of the research, not as a correction, but as a new iteration of the creative process. Screenings and affiliated workshop will aim to allow others—particularly members of the diaspora or people connected to the place—to contribute and create from memories, narratives, and interpretations that exceed the perspective of the filmmaker.