The video installation VOID is based on a film project of the same name, developed during a ten-day, deeply immersive “practice of dwelling” at the Welzow-Süd open-pit lignite mine. As a group of 17 people, we spent ten days in a landscape that had been radically transformed by human intervention.
The starting point was an experiment. What happens when we engage with such a place without seeking to shape, explain, or control it? Inspired by the concept of degrowth (Degrowth – also referred to as post-growth – is a term used in critiques of economic and social systems. It describes the planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption in order to reduce resource use and live within the Earth’s ecological limits), we were interested in the possibility of producing less and, instead, perceiving more. Slowing down thus became an artistic method. We listened to the wind, the dust, the machines, the voices, the sounds of our own breathing. We understand listening here as an act of making space: making space for one’s own body, making space for other living beings. Understanding space as something that existed before us and will continue to exist after us.

In this process, we understood the body as a site of perception. A body that listens with its whole being – that senses its weight, its volume, its transience, and its relationship to other bodies, materials, and spaces. A body that does not take its own perspective for granted, but opens itself to what exists beyond it. This attitude gives rise to an in-between space: between body and landscape, between human and material, between control and receptivity. At the same time, this endeavour evokes a temporarily autonomous state of being – beyond time and purpose, entrusted to emptiness – in which one exposes oneself to uncertainty, transformation, and encounter.
The landscape became an interlocutor, a protagonist.
As an experiential, embodied, and philosophical process, VOID takes the form of a film, while largely resisting the conventions of narrative cinema. Instead of a plot with a beginning and an end, a sensory study unfolds. The video moves from one state of feeling to another and invites you to become part of the experience yourself. VOID can be understood as an elegy – dedicated to one of many possible futures. It is a future we often speak about, yet whose images we rarely contemplate in concrete terms and whose consequences we are reluctant to feel physically. The film explores this future through sensation, rather than through information or explanation.

The wolf sculpture introduces another presence into the space. Its existence eludes any simple reading. There is vulnerability and exposure in its gaze; control and superiority are absent. It shares the same uncertainty as the people in the film.

Can we, for a moment, relinquish our anthropocentric certainty and open ourselves to a form of perception based on coexistence rather than domination? Not by imitating or identifying with the wolf, but by stepping into a zone of proximity in which fixed identities – human here, animal there – lose their contours. The gaze becomes a threshold event in which both the viewer and the wolf transform into a third, indeterminate form.

In this way, the installation touches upon the very mechanism through which humans have historically defined themselves in opposition to animals. By sharing the wolf’s gaze rather than mastering it, this mechanism begins to falter. The boundary that was meant to separate human and animal is not crossed, but instead revealed as a construct.

The wolf invites you to engage with a different form of seeing that extends beyond a purely human perspective. The film itself recedes into the background. What becomes crucial is the invitation to keep the wolf company and, for a moment, to view the world together through its unfamiliar gaze.
The sense of estrangement extends beyond the wolf itself. The film, too, carries this sense within itself – as a feeling of alienation that touches upon the conditions of its own making. With the presence of this body, a fragile relationship takes shape between the film and the future from which it emerges: the film, too, is part of that larger network it seeks to question. The human no longer appears as the measure of all things. Rather, the human is a node within a larger constellation of relationships, dependencies, and influences, brought forth by countless bodies, gazes, and sensations, by humans and animals, nature and technology – for the film itself, as a technological medium, is part of this network. The film thus becomes a space in which to practise a form of responsibility that does not seek to understand the wolf, but rather to allow itself to be questioned by it. Perhaps this is precisely where the installation’s true achievement lies: in creating a moment of stillness in which the open becomes visible, without immediately being closed off again by a new answer.

Text by Levent Duran and Senem Gökçe Oğultekin
Levent Duran is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and pacifist, and Senem Gökçe Oğultekin is a choreographer, performer and filmmaker.