Jessica Sarah Rinland Discusses Her Latest Sensorial Documentary ‘Collective Monologue’ at Its Locarno Premiere

variety.com:

Collective Monologue,” she expands her focus beyond human appendages. Her focus on instances of touch between caretaker Maca and the animals at the Buenos Aires Eco-Park, which are frequently framed by the park’s enclosures, reveals a tension between the radical acts of care and the politics of captivity inherent to institutions such as zoos. “My interest in hands has to do with process, it has to do with labor, it has to do with tools,” Rinland tells Variety following a press screening before the film’s world premiere at Locarno.Her multi-disciplinary career as an artist, which also encompasses book-making and installation work, has always focused on alternative modes of perception.

The films she makes and the tools she uses come to her organically. In her own words: “They are things that I like and the things that I want to see.” Her short film “Expression of the Sightless”(2015) observes a blind man who experiences a statue through the sensation of touch, and in “Ý Berá – Bright Waters” (2016), she asks whether it is possible to assume the perspective of an animal through filmmaking.

In “Collective Monologue,” interspecies touch takes on a different meaning as labor becomes intertwined with care. “There’s a moment of touch between Maca and Venus, one of the howler monkeys, where Maca’s hair becomes Venus’s hair.

Blending together, they become intertwined bodies in a way.” Affective scenes like these capture the film’s central conflict: the tension between the labor of individual caretakers and institutions whose origins can be traced to European concepts.