Isabelle Stengers: Building Hope on the Edge of the Abyss

Fabrizio Terranova (1971, Italy) lives and works in Brussels. Filmmaker and professor at erg (school of graphic research) in Brussels, where he initiated and co-directs the Master's program Narratives and Experimentation/Speculative Narration. He works in particular on tensions, relationships, and misleading perceptions between "popular" and “avant-garde” cultures. He directed Donna Haraway, Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016 - Anthology Film Archives, KunstenFestivaldesArts, Tate Modern, Critical Zones – Observatories for Earthly Politics,...) and published Les Enfants du compost in the collective work Gestes spéculatifs (Les Presses du réel, 2015), as well as Pour un film chien! in the collective work Habiter le trouble avec Donna Haraway (Editions du Dehors, 2019). He is also a founding member, along with Emilie Hermant, Isabelle Stengers, Vinciane Despret, and others, of DingDingDong – Institut de coproduction de savoir sur la maladie de Huntington DingDingDong – Institut de coproduction de savoir sur la maladie de Huntington (Huntington's Disease Knowledge Co-production Institute), for which he recently directed Absolute Beginners (2019 - IFFR, International Film Festival Rotterdam, DOK Leipzig, etc.). His first film, Josée Andrei, An Insane Portrait (2010), was followed by a book published by Éditions du souffle.

In this documentary film essay, a mysterious house and a magical forest set the stage for the rebellious Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Terranova’s carefully directed dialogue with nature initiates us into the threads of her ecological thought. Stengers responds to what she describes as “catastrophic times” and a “coming barbarism” by proposing a cosmopolitical multiplicity of non-hierarchical practices and cooperative common world of humans and other life forms. 

Isabelle Stengers: Building Hope on the Edge of theAbyss | R: Fabrizio Terranova | BEL 2023 | 75 min | OmeU