Collective Monologue

While most visitors to a zoo are assumed to leave with a greater understanding of the animals housed within, such spaces can reveal just as much about the humans who design and manage them. With Collective Monologue, Wavelengths alumna Jessica Sarah Rinland pursues her ongoing concerns with the relationship between humans and the natural world — particularly as mediated by institutions. At the film’s core are the animals and staff in various Argentinian zoos and shelters — including the Buenos Aires Ecopark, established as a zoo in the late 19th century — capturing not just tender moments of interspecies interaction but also administrative and infrastructural details. Zookeeper Maca provides around-the-clock dedication to the animals enclosed in one of these increasingly polemical spaces, a job she has held for over 20 years, while forming meaningful bonds transcendent of language and the imagined boundaries between humans and animals.

Beyond its fascinating portrayal of interspecies care, Collective Monologue features remarkable 16mm footage of the resident creatures — and some amazing surveillance camera glimpses of nocturnal anteaters — as well as archival detours, which reveal a parallel inquiry into questions of labour, gender, and colonial conquest over the natural world. With a form that is intricate and precise, while pleasingly fragmented and open in construction, Rinland’s hypnotic approach invites questions about how we not only look at animals, but also share the world with them.

ANDRÉA PICARD