Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum

Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum—a film dedicated to tenderness—is the third collaboration between renowned writer and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva and filmmaker Arjuna Neuman. Interrogating empathy and violence, the film traces the transformations enacted on the natural world in the modern period, wherein living and non-living things have been treated as a standing reserve from which to extract resources. The element of earth is central as the camera moves from significant places in the biographies of the artists from Brazil to Indonesia, to major infrastructure that disintegrates in particles of soot. The film asks the questions Can tenderness dissolve total violence? Can tears displace total extraction? Reimagining the human and its subject-formation away from predatory desire and lethal abstraction, away from the mind and eyes and noble senses, away from total extraction and its articulations as ethnography, border regimes, slavery, sexual abuse, trade, and mining. Instead, the film turns toward skin, resonance, and tenderness as the raw material of a reimagined earthy sensibility—remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and to attend to is to care for, to serve.

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