Mutualism

Mutualism Curated by Zacarías González. Presented by the Institute for Public Architecture in collaboration with The Film-Makers' Cooperative. Governors Island, New York, July 25, 2026.

Mutualism was presented at the Institute for Public Architecture on Governors Island in collaboration with The Film-Makers' Cooperative: fifteen experimental films and videos spanning five decades, from Nancy Graves's 1973 Aves to work made this decade, screened silently across the park on power gathered from the sun over the course of the day.

The previous summer's program met us In the Garden(Avant-Garden). This year the lens lowered and widened at once, moving from the tended plot to the web of relations that any garden depends on. Hai-Li Kong's Flower to Flower, a superimposed reverie of daffodils and spring made in the stillness of the New York lockdown, offered the hinge: shot in open homage to Marie Menken's Glimpse of the Garden, it looks back at the earlier garden even as it opens onto something larger, and its title names the oldest partnership of all, the traffic between blossom and pollinator on which so much life quietly rests.

Mutualism is the biologists' word for a relationship in which two different species each live better for the other's presence: the bee and the blossom, the fungus threaded invisibly through a plant's roots, the bird that clears a larger animal's hide. The program took this relation as both its subject and its ethic. Its point of departure was Anne Katrine Senstad's The Sugarcane Labyrinth, a living sculpture the artist grew across an acre and a half of Louisiana farmland in collaboration with a local farmer, on a coastline that has lost more than 1,800 square miles of wetland in a single century. To watch it is to walk into a structure made of soil, cane, and pink ribbon, and to lose your bearings inside a landscape that is at once agriculture, architecture, and a form of mourning for ground that is slipping into the sea. From this threshold the program borrowed its method: coming down to the ground, moving slowly, and practicing what the anthropologist Anna Tsing calls the arts of noticing.

There are broad continuities across the works: a patience that lets duration do the looking, a reversal of scale that moves small or nonhuman life to the center of the frame, and a treatment of the camera less as an instrument of mastery than of noticing. What persists across these fifty years is that mode of attention; what changes is the stakes. Nancy Graves's and James Cagle's early studies looked closely at the nonhuman when such looking was largely a formal proposition; in the recent work of G. Anthony Svatek and Anne Katrine Senstad the same gaze falls on islands and coastlines under visible strain, and the program asked what five decades of looking closely has, and has not, managed to hold onto. The divergences of form are just as telling: the selection moved across gauges and eras, from 16mm and Super 8 to high definition and a range of digital and cameraless practices, and across registers, from the structural rigor of Cagle's slow zoom on moving water to the essayistic found footage of .TV, the hand-stained material surfaces of Abinadi Meza's Parangolé, and the documentary warmth of Megan Rossman's portrait of an urban beekeeper. Some films observe from a distance; others, like Rhona Eve Clews's, collapse it entirely, meeting a plant at the level of the soil.

By placing these works alongside one another, the program staged a dialogue between The Film-Makers' Cooperative's long stewardship of the experimental moving image and the Institute for Public Architecture's work on the social, physical, and environmental inequities of the city. Both are, in their way, mutualist institutions: alternative spaces that have incubated rigorous, unremunerative work by holding it in common. Read against a present of accelerating ecological loss, extractive development, and unevenly distributed environmental harm, their shared legacy proposes that attention to other forms of life is not a retreat from civic questions but a condition of answering them.

To gather in the park after dark, amid screens lit by the day's stored sun while the surrounding lives carried on unscripted, was to rehearse the program's central claim in practice: that our ecological crisis is also a crisis of attention, and that mutualism, living so that other lives thrive alongside our own, is as much a civic practice as a natural one.

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