3. Video Essays

Followly’s Art–Science Lab.

Some films do not aim to explain a practice. They approach it from another angle, through images, reflections and fragments that invite viewers to think, to feel and sometimes to question what they see. The videos gathered in this section belong to this family.

Through poetic voice-overs, sometimes humor or more experimental cinematic forms, our films use tracking as a lens through which to look at broader questions: the relationship between humans and other animals, the way landscapes are inhabited, or the place of attention in contemporary societies.

DISCLAIMER: Some films in this section contain imagery and ideas that may disturb. Please be aware and watch them in an appropriate context

Their aim is simple: to provoke curiosity, to awaken a sense of wonder, sometimes also to open a space for constructive critique. Because the practice of tracking itself begins that way, with a small sign on the ground and a question that expands and expands into something larger.

More seriously, Followly works somewhere between artistic practice and field-based knowledge. We develop collaborations bringing together practitioners of tracking and ecological observation, artists working with image, sound or narrative… and you.

Art-Science Methodology

An artist, sometimes unfamiliar with tracking, enters a field situation with a tracking practitioner. What happens next belongs partly to the encounter. Something is noticed, misunderstood, displaced, translated. The artist responds through their own practice. The resulting fragments may take very different forms: free artistic interpretations, field recordings, observational material, experimental or impressionistic pieces, hybrid forms.

Diffraction

Followly does not aim to produce a single, unified representation of tracking. The project returns again and again to the same subject from different positions (knowledge is always situated, partial and embodied!). Each fragment carries its own perspective, none pretends to stand outside what it observes. Together, they form something closer to a diffracted landscape where differences remain visible rather than being resolved into a single image.

For audiences who may never have encountered tracking directly, these fragments offer another route through perception, emotion, attention & resonance.

The audience enters the field

The fragments do not stop at the screen. In our Interactive Drift Mode, visitors are invited to respond through a set of guiding questions: How does this fragment blur or define the boundary between “nature” and “culture”? What kind of society would grow from this?…

Participants choose one question and write freely. Responses are collected anonymously and contribute to an evolving ecopoetic composition. Once a year, in spring, this composition appears: a temporary emergence. Year after year, these appearances form a living ecopoetic archive. A trace of how the constructed boundary between “nature” and “culture” is itself moving!