Prompt: The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted an increasing awareness that the dominant modes of human life are no longer tenable. This extended moment of stress and isolation forces many to confront their living conditions and demands a broader reconsideration of the presupposed divisions between cities and the countryside, culture and nature. While rural terrain is often romanticized through lexicons replete with pastoral imagery, it is also highly regulated—it is the place of deforestation, fracking, mining, factory farming, imminent urbanization and countless other forms of resource extraction, in which humans often engage with other species violently. The pandemic is a symptom of this ecological crisis—an environmental attitude of exploitation in which lines are drawn between the idea of human and environmental space, with humans placed at the center. Nevertheless, these zones are not discrete. Humans and their homes exist within entangled ecosystems that implicate non- human actors as well as peri-urban and rural expanse. This screening program brought together an international group of artists who consider the relationship between the built and natural environment, the traffic between city and countryside, and the embattled ideological currents circulating through this multi-form flow.

Image credit: Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Boat People, 2020