Catalogue > At random

Creatures of the Lines is an artist film and collaboration with anthropologist Heather Anne Swanson. It explores how desires for economic growth and linear progress have produced straightened forms in England’s watery terrains and asks what risks are associated with the conversion of once-curvy and braided worlds into a linearised landscape. Drawing on their longstanding research interests and conversations exploring the risks to and in aquatic ecologies with freshwater scientists, the film explores how English waterscapes have been transformed via the construction of canals. As arteries of British Empire, canals linked Indian cotton fields to domestic textile mills, facilitating vast ecological transformations from monoculture agriculture in the colonies to industrial discharges in England’s waters, soils, and air– and thus serve as a key site for exploring often-overlooked histories of colonial capitalism and their material presences in contemporary worlds. Attempting to work from within muddy, submerged sites, rather than from grand narratives or “god’s-eye” viewpoints, the work begins inside canals, telling stories from within the lines. Making use of the open-ended sensibilities of ethnography and natural history, it raises questions about ecological transformations and their ties to infra/structures of global political economy.

Sonia Levy's inquiry-led practice considers shifting modes of engagement with more-than-human worlds in light of prevailing Earthly precarity. Her work operates at the confluence of knowledge practices to interrogate Western expansionist and extractivist logics. She is the 2023-2024 recipient of the European Marine Board artist-in-residence programme. She was the 2022 selected artist of the S+T+ARTS4Water residency hosted by TBA21 in Venice and the 2021 commissioned artist at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University's "Ecological Globalization Research Group". She has presented her work internationally, including shows and screenings at Ocean Space, Venice; Museo Thyssen, Madrid; Museo CA2M, Madrid; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; ICA, London; The Showroom, London; Goldsmiths College, London; BALTIC, Gateshead; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Art Laboratory Berlin; HDKV, Heidelberg; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, Verksmiðjan á Hjalteyri, Iceland Whale Museum, Iceland; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge USA; NYU Gallatin, New-York, Paris. Her work has been published by MIT Press and Thames & Hudson.