myth, moth, mother
2024
Video / 17:10’’
myth, moth, mother is a short film that speaks to us through a moth that has learned our language. It offers a glimpse into the moth’s forms, dreams, and transformations. The film invites us to dissolve with the narrator, who regresses to our non-human origins to examine what binds us together across species. Moving between the micro and the macro, the film speculatively reimagines perception, transformation, and kinship as shared conditions of life.
Rooted in queer ecology and informed by the principles of Buen Vivir, the film draws from precolonial ontologies that understand life as fundamentally relational. The moth is approached not as a symbol but as a more-than-human subject, destabilizing hierarchical separations between nature and culture and proposing coexistence, reciprocity, and interdependence as ways of knowing and being.
Through research on myths and moths, the film challenges Western epistemologies that privilege clarity, progress, and human centrality. Instead of framing darkness as absence or threat, myth, moth, mother turns to nocturnal ecologies as spaces of sensitivity, attunement, and transformation. In doing so, Solís Bravo opens an unlit yet generative zone for reconsidering how knowledge is formed and how humans might situate themselves within living systems rather than above them.
Shot in the Peruvian Amazon, the film elucidates the dim landscape of moths as a vehicle for transformation. Solís Bravo utilizes several image-making technologies related to science in the making of this film that add depth to the possibilities of a digital camera: An electron microscope, a thermal camera, camera traps and Micro CT-Scanners. All this to further access the unseen.
Credits:
Sound and music design: Thessa Torsing a.k.a upsammy
3D imagery: Paula Garcia Sans
Thermal footage: Daniel Echecopar
Night audio recordings: Luce Roux
Camera trap footage: Lorena Solís Bravo
Electron Microscopy and Micro CT scans done in collaboration with Naturalis Research Centre
Financed by: Mondriaan Fonds
Filmed at Tambopata Research Center, Perú
concept, filmed & written by Lorena Solís Bravo
Photographs: Fabian Landewee
If you are interested in watching the film please write me an email to solisbravolorena@gmail.com