Quasi Real: The Organ
Story World
Quasi Real: The Organ is a hybrid moving image story unfolding through three film etudes, set in the temperate rainforest of Dartmoor. Developed in Devon, it brings together feminine cosmology, ritual practice, sensorial sculpture, and the body as an oracular and resonant instrument. The journey moves through streams, roots, moss, hollows in trees, bark, lichen, mud, stone, fungal growth, and hidden animal passages, treating the rainforest as living archive, psychic terrain, and elemental companion.
Across the three etudes, the journey unfolds through three distinct expressions of feminine becoming, each developed with one participating woman at a time, and each opening a particular relation with plant, animal, elemental, and imaginal life. The work moves through an oscillation between lived reality and imaginal transformation, where documentary encounter and fairytale atmosphere remain in active relation. Each story stays rooted in the textures of a real life while allowing those textures to pass into ritual form, sensorial metamorphosis, and more than human kinship.
Sculptural responses emerge as extensions of this process, allowing materiality to support metamorphosis and draw the living body closer to its wild counterpart. What begins to emerge is something larger than the individual body. Each woman becomes one living register within a wider forest instrument, as sculptural forms, membranes, hollows, tubes, skins, roots, and sounding surfaces gather into an organismal architecture shaped through relation with the land.
The story is conceived as a living archive of women’s mythology and embodied encounter. Reflection, gestation, recollection, cyclical return, and feminine waters move through the work as recurring forces. Quasi Real: The Organinhabits a space between poetic cinema, moving image installation, sensorial sculpture, and fairytale.
Story Ground
Quasi Real: The Organ begins from the sense that space is navigated through body, rhythm, song, return, and ritual orientation. Streams become paths. Water crossings become thresholds. Animal tracks become lines of attention. Trees become portals. Hollows in bark and openings in the earth become entrances into subconscious terrain. The rainforest holds psychic and material traces at once, and the body becomes a means of sensing these crossings.
A strong thread within the first etude is the relation between reflection, incubation, and emergence. Memory appears through surfaces, echoes, and returns. The story moves with a sense of soul as a field between matter and spirit, where impressions are preserved, recollected, and brought again into form. The lunar principle appears here as a reflective ray that receives, holds, and hatches spirit into form.
This opens into a wider inquiry around female organs, cyclical intelligence, feminine waters, and bodily knowing. Ovaries, cavities, breath, fluidity, resonance, and internal chambers become part of the story’s symbolic and sonic vocabulary. The body begins to appear as a system of chambers and passages through which memory, pressure, vibration, and elemental relation may gather into form.
A key part of the process invites the participating woman in each etude to trace her inner imaginal terrain in relation with the rainforest. Through returning, marking, mapping, and moving with the site, she allows inner and outer terrains to enter relation. Waterways, hollows, roots, shelters, thresholds, and points of opening are marked as psychic and ecological features. Meaning gathers through recurrence, cyclical movement, and repeated re entry into the same places with altered attention.
Plant life, animal life, soil life, and elemental matter move through the story as living presences. Roots, spores, bark, sap, mud, clay, mineral trace, damp ground, feather, fungus, and hidden burrow form part of its tactile language. The rainforest offers a reservoir of forms, rhythms, textures, and calls. Through returning to this reservoir, the woman’s body gradually opens, attunes, and transforms.
The Three Etudes
Together, the three etudes trace a passage through feminine becoming. Each etude follows a different female being, shaped through her own bodily presence, rhythm, and field of relation with the rainforest. One may carry permeability, sensing, and first transformation. Another may gather cyclical intelligence, rootedness, relation, and embodied force. Another may move with elder wildness, threshold knowledge, bone memory, and intimate relation with root, dark, soil, and return.
Each etude is developed with one participating woman at a time. Each carries its own material language, sensorial rhythm, and field of kinship with the living rainforest. Together, they form a triptych of feminine passage shaped through body, place, and metamorphosis, with each etude acting as a distinct register within a larger sensorial and resonant whole.
The First Etude
The first etude unfolds as a moving image fairytale shaped through nocturnal vision, song, sculptural transformation, and sensorial encounter with the temperate rainforest of Dartmoor. A woman enters a threshold world where moonlight becomes passage, insects become interlocutors, and the body begins to change through relation with soil, root, hollow, plant life, and animal call. She appears as a hybrid of light and dark, carrying reflection and shadow, tenderness and ferality, as her body becomes a chamber of passage and vibration through which other realities may gather.
Alongside its imaginal structure, the film remains open to real encounters drawn from the participating woman’s life. Her gestures, memories, voice, domestic textures, family traces, routines, and ways of moving through the world enter the etude as grounding material. From there, prosthetic amputations of her daily reality drifting into imaginary oceans allow the ordinary to pass into threshold, spell, and metamorphosis. Lived traces pass into ritual form, and fairytale presences move alongside intimate fragments of experience.
The rainforest becomes a psychic well and a living reservoir. Waterways, hollows in trunks, roots, mud, stone, insect traces, fungal growth, feathers, seed forms, and mineral textures become coordinates in a cartography of relation. Through returning to these places and transposing bodily gesture onto their features, the woman enters a deeper field of correspondence. Animal voices enter dance. Plant life enters posture. Soil enters the skin. The body comes into relation with terrain through listening, resonance, mimicry, and trance like attention.
Bodies of Memory
A key current within Quasi Real: The Organ is the understanding of the body as a multi dimensional being, carrying memory across skin, tissue, gesture, breath, and voice. The body holds lived experience, ancestral residue, symbolic pattern, and subconscious association at once. Through sensorial and ritual practice, these layers gather into visibility.
The story explores bodies of memory through repeated return to place, poetic conversation, somatic attunement, sculptural making, and sensorial scores born from meeting rainforest, land, plant, animal, and soil. The body becomes porous to more than human presences while remaining shaped by the textures and intimacies of everyday life.
Place itself is also memory bearing. Water crossings, hollows, roots, forest thresholds, cardinal directions, lunar phases, and ceremonial gestures shape the orientation of the work. Through return, these sites gather charge and become part of the story’s ritual cartography.
Body as Instrument
A core line of inquiry within Quasi Real: The Organ is the body as acoustic instrument. Breath, voice, skin, bone, pelvis, chest, mouth, womb space, and cavity are approached as resonant chambers. Sound arises through vibration, pressure, pulse, whisper, hum, exhalation, friction, and call. The story explores how the living body may become an instrument through which plant, animal, soil, and elemental presences begin to sound.
What is already present here is the body as chamber, cavity, membrane, resonant field, and threshold. Yet what begins to emerge is something larger than the individual body. The woman is no longer only becoming an instrument herself. She becomes one living register within a wider forest instrument. Sculptural forms, extensions, membranes, tubes, skins, hollows, roots, and sounding surfaces begin to suggest an organismal architecture, almost a ritual organ of the land, activated through breath, pressure, weather, voice, and elemental intelligence.
Through attunement, the rainforest speaks through the body of memory. The ecosystem sounds through the body as it opens, listens, and transforms. Voice begins to follow the howl of an owl. Fingers gather the quickness of an insect. Arms lengthen toward roots. Through resonance, contact, and material transformation, the woman performer moves toward a wild counterpart, while also participating in a larger sensorial structure distributed across body, site, sculpture, and sound.
Body Alterations and Materiality
The story develops a sculptural practice of bodily transformation through adornment, masking, layering, and wearable construction. These forms arise through co arising encounters with the rainforest body, through re meeting root, bark, hollow, mud, feather, fungus, and stone. Materiality supports transformation and draws the living body closer to its wild counterpart.
Possible forms include layered skins, membranes, shell structures, root like growths, exoskeletal frameworks, tactile protrusions, breathing appendages, resonant chambers, tubes, drum skin surfaces, extra bones, and hybrid surfaces that carry insect, vegetal, fungal, subterranean, and oceanic memory. These sculptural elements shape gesture, silhouette, sound, and presence, allowing the woman to inhabit a threshold between human, animal, plant, spirit, and elemental matter.
Methodology
The methodology of Quasi Real: The Organ begins with entering the living site. Each etude is created with one participating woman at a time, allowing the journey to unfold with intimacy, slowness, and precision. The temperate rainforest of Dartmoor, its soil kingdom, plant presences, animal traces, hollows, roots, streams, bark, stone, and fungal life, forms the reservoir of the etude. Through repeated attention, textures, calls, gestures, memories, figures, and sensorial correspondences begin to gather.
The woman returns to the same places again and again, marking crossings, hollows, thresholds, roots, shelters, and openings. Through this repeated return, she maps her inner imaginal terrain in relation with the rainforest. Body and site gradually enter relation. The living forest opens the body, and the body in turn begins to answer through movement, posture, voice, rhythm, and sculptural response.
From this meeting, somatic, poetic, and sensorial scores begin to arise. Through them, the body spirals further into subconscious and sensorial transformation. Sculptural responses arise as extensions of this unfolding, allowing materiality to support metamorphosis and draw the living body closer to its wild counterpart. Through this process, sculptural forms may begin to relate not only to the individual performer, but to a larger field of sounding structures across the site, as though each etude were assembling its own distributed organ of body, matter, breath, and land.
The story unfolds through cyclical return, site based ritual, sculptural making, vocal attunement, and embodied relation with more than human kin in their chimeric multiplicity. Camera and sound enter this field as living participants.
TO VIEW A DIARY OF WRITTEN SCORES
Camera and Sound
Camera and sound move with the unfolding encounter, entering the same living field as performer, soil, root, hollow, bark, stream, and call. They follow breath, rhythm, closeness, hesitation, texture, and emergence. Framing becomes a way of listening. Proximity becomes a form of touch. Duration allows the body, the site, and the sculptural materials to reveal their relation over time. Image arises through contact, attunement, and sensorial reciprocity.
Inquiries
This story is shaped by a series of artistic and methodological questions.How might sensorial and ritual practices generate moving image works that move between lived reality, feminine cosmology, and imaginal transformation.
How may the temperate rainforest of Dartmoor, its soil kingdom, plant presences, animal traces, and elemental matter, co arise through the body as memory, instrument, and threshold.
How may sculptural transformation and resonant extensions draw the living body closer to its wild counterpart while also contributing to a wider organismal and resonant structure.
What kind of cinematic language can emerge when lived encounter, sensorial poetics, and more than human kinship shape the structure of a film.
How can a series of etudes function as an evolving archive of relation, metamorphosis, and place based imagination.
Context and Framework
Quasi Real: The Organ draws upon eco somatics, ritual arts, sensorial sculpture, performance ethnography, fairytale structures, surreal materiality, and moving image practices that hold mythic atmosphere and lived encounter in the same frame. The story values gesture, trace, rhythm, material intelligence, and the slow emergence of meaning through embodied relation with place.
Contribution and Artistic Intent
Quasi Real: The Organ seeks to develop a distinct language for moving image in which film, sculpture, voice, body, and living site arise together. It proposes cinema as a multimodal ecology of body, materiality, place, and transformation. Through this story, lived encounter, feminine mythology, plant and animal kinship, elemental matter, and sensorial sculptural practice gather into contemporary image form.
The work approaches cinema as a resonant structure in which bodies, materials, environments, and presences sound through one another. It asks how film may hold ritual atmosphere, psychic cartography, and ecological relation at once, while remaining grounded in the textures of lived experience.
New Forms
The story will generate a trilogy of moving image etudes. It will also generate sculptural extensions, resonant body based forms, vocal and sound material, and a wider archive of scores, mappings, conversations, and visual artefacts. These materials are created first as elements of the filmic world, shaping its sensorial, sculptural, and resonant language. At a later stage, some may also extend beyond the frame into installation form, where chambers, membranes, sculptural organs, sounding surfaces, and bodily extensions continue to unfold in space.