We live immersed in life’s intimate tangle with other forms of life. Science has probed deeply into the universe we sit within and answered many questions about how it has come to be and how it works. It can provide intricate details about our biochemical and physical functions and in doing so, it has certainly helped our species to overcome some of the vicissitudes of being a terrestrial organism. But, while science may offer a valuable framework for establishing a highly instrumental relationship with the world, it also permits us to gloss over a formidable ignorance.

Children always ask the larger questions that adults learn not to ask. Natural history documentaries offer up remarkable images of nature and then call upon scientific research to explain away complex biological relationships with confident voiceovers that distract us from those larger questions, often providing reductive answers that both guide and derail our own thoughts. Yet, most images captured in those documentaries are fundamentally inexplicable, the result of billions of years of emergent development—an unfinished symphony of unpredictably complex interactions that have incrementally transcended antecedent conditions. Terrestrial life is dynamic, unique, and, as far as we can tell, defies comparison with anything else in the universe.

Life is an anomaly built on anomalies.

We are such a remarkably capable species within the web of life and yet we cannot seem to take on board the peril that we have placed ourselves in. We have achieved an unbridled instrumentality without the wisdom to acknowledge our larger befuddlement at the whole we are merely a part of and how we might take steps to recover our crucial continuity with other interconnective lifeforms within this fragile Earthly skin.

In Aotearoa’s less accessible fringes one can still observe on a primal scale the redolent, living tapestries that once characterised these islands; however, having escaped our attentions, on the micro-scale, many of life’s intertwinements still endure, sub rosa, around us.

Small Entanglements cinematically projects a selection of tiny quotidian interactions taking place on our periphery, fragments of diverse and intricately woven lives — without scientific annotation.

There are quiet truths beyond science or dogma to be found in the magic of small and overlooked spaces. In the exquisite tension between naive conjecture and the discomfort of uncertainty, perhaps we might consider other ways of behaving in relation to the lives around us.

Small Entanglements, a disarticulated cinema installation at Gallery Anomalous, 16 Hamilton Road, Surfdale, Waiheke Island, Auckland July 10-15, 2023, nights from Dusk to 10pm.