animistica

synopsis

Nikki Schusters animistica opens with the viewer awakening as if inside a restless dream, transformed into a strange vermin. The camera assumes the perspective of an insect burrowing through the dark crumbling underground, kindred to the community of beetles swarming under the idyllic green facade of the lawn in David Lynch´s famous opening sequence of Blue Velvet. However, this is no straightforward soil. Organic textures of all kinds interweave and rush by, innumberable macro shots of Mexican flora and fauna morph and melt into a pulsing visual weave conjuring an instinctive sense of creepy crawling by way of a wondrous fantasy biotope. As in nature, change constitutes its basic principle, the interplay of growth and decay: Earth becomes bark becomes bone becomes feathers becomes sand, stone, pelt and fur.