Elise Guillaume reflects on the making of her film Eventual Horizon filmed during a journey to the Arctic and its theme of personal and environmental grief.
Through filmmaking, I create relationships between psychological states and environmental change. The body is an essential element in my work, I use it as a vessel for interpreting living beings that form our natural world. I’m interested in exploring the fluidity between the self and others, the inside and the outside, the intimate and the collective. In my last film, Eventual Horizon, I thread together my personal experience of insomnia, grief and hope. I filmed most of Eventual Horizon in the high Arctic in April 2023 when I joined the Arctic Circle – a residency for artists & scientists that takes place in the Svalbard archipelago aboard the tall ship Antigua. This text is a reflection on my time in the Arctic and the filmmaking process that led to making Eventual Horizon.
Location scouting is an important stage in my filmmaking process. I usually visit a place multiple times before doing any filming. During these visits, I will work with analogue photography to slow down this initial phase of research. Working more slowly allows me to build a relationship with the land and its ecosystems before introducing the camera. However, in the Arctic it was challenging for me to have this approach in the context of the Arctic Circle residency. We were on a voyage, constantly moving from place to place and highly dependent on weather conditions. Every place we visited, every glacier, every body of water and ice we encountered was unique. At first glance, the Arctic might seem calm, perhaps even static. But in reality, all these bodies of ice and water are completely alive. During the first days aboard the ship, I was filming a lot, too much. I was trying to record everything from the Arctic. But I soon realised that no matter how much I recorded, I was bound to fail in making any work that would amount to the wonders unfolding in front of me. Equally, I was missing some of these wonders being too occupied with the camera.
Things shifted on the day that I put the waders on and got into the water for the first time. In the water, I could get up close to icebergs and discover their anatomy from a more intimate perspective. I became fascinated with textures and shapes of ice. The more I looked, the more textures and forms I discovered. Sometimes, I would focus on one piece of ice for hours. I discovered ice in all its states of metamorphosis. At times, the ice resembled human body parts. I used my macro lenses a lot. I was looking so closely that it felt like I was ‘inside’ a body of ice. Being in the water allowed me to discover the anatomy of ice from a more intimate perspective. I focused on a smaller perimeter rather than trying to film the entire horizon. I ended up filming less but I knew that the footage I was recording would end up in the film because I had found a visceral intimacy with ice.
Humans are made of 60% water. Our insides are filled with liquids, we are fluid. Our skin is porous, we sweat and we evaporate into one another. Our skin is an illusion of a barrier from other watery bodies, human and more-than-human alike. We are all bodies of water.1 Inspired by Astrida Neimanis’ concept of hydrofeminism, I question what it means to be a body of water in a watery world at a time of hydro-ecological precarity.2 I’m interested in making work that transcends the boundaries between living organisms to create an audiovisual dialogue of multispecies kinship. In Eventual Horizon, I wanted human and more-than-human watery bodies to morph into one another. I thought of ice as skin and the movement of breathing as the movement of waves. When we filmed the body footage in a studio with DoP John Janssens, I wanted us to take a similar approach to filming the body to the way I filmed ice in the Arctic so we focused on a small perimeter. We used macro probe lenses, a type of lens usually used in nature documentaries to film the body. Using this type of lens allows for a shift in perspective in how we usually perceive the body from the human eye. This shift in visualisation offers endless possibilities to explore multispecies affiliations.
My filmmaking process is non-linear. As I’m editing, I often continue to film, write and record the voice over. There isn’t a hierarchy between image, sound or text. The sound edit will affect the tone of delivery of the VO, the image will impact the rhythm of sound and so on. This means that my editing process is often very long as I try to figure out how to balance agency within the different components of the film. Each film comes with its own challenges and there isn’t a fixed recipe for filmmaking. For Eventual Horizon, my biggest challenge was the voice over. At first, I struggled with the form and delivery of the voice over to include the viewer within the film. It turned out to be a matter of shifting registers in the delivery of the voice and changing pronouns from ‘you’ to ‘she’ for Eventual Horizon to hold space for the viewer’s imagination and interpretation. Another breakthrough moment of the edit was when I started thinking about the voice over as punctuation for sound and image rather than a linear text. There was more space to focus on each element of the film whereas before they seemed to be competing with each other. The edit became more fluid.
One day in the Arctic, we arrived in the bay of Dalhbreen. The ship’s GPS indicated that we were inside the glacier but in reality we were 1km away from the glacier. The ice is melting so fast that maps can’t keep up. For most of the voyage, we were navigating in uncharted waters. In Dalhbreen we did a landing on a small island facing the glacier. On the island, I was filming textures of ice, when suddenly, the glacier carved. I heard this sound for the first time and it sounded similar to an earthquake. I looked up and saw a large piece of ice, somewhat the size of a small house, fall into the sea. A wave formed and we gathered in the centre of the island as the sea level rose. Ice is supposed to carve in spring but not at this rate. I heard the sound of carving glaciers way too much during the voyage.
Sound is an essential element of my filmmaking practice. I think of sound as the emotional driver in films. In the Arctic, I used different microphones to capture sounds that are not usually perceived by the human ear. For example, I used geophones to record the vibratory sounds of ice and hydrophones to record underwater environments. In the waders, I could get up close to icebergs and place my hydrophone inside hollow parts of ice. I recorded the sound of glaciers melting. As the ice melted, I heard the crackling sounds of ancient air bubbles escape into the atmosphere; the sound of deep time memories evaporating. While it felt very eerie to be documenting this loss, it also felt essential to include this sonic landscape in Eventual Horizon. Together with the sound of carving glaciers, these sounds came together to form an expression of a mourning song for the loss of the earth’s memory.
There is no doubt that the ecological crisis is having a psychological impact on our society. Studies show that people are increasingly experiencing psychological reactions such as ecological grief, climate anxiety and solastalgia among others.3 Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia is the distress and inability of finding solace in a familiar place due to environmental degradation.4 Ecological grief is described as the sense of loss emerging from experiencing environmental and ecological degradation and climate anxiety comes from experiencing anxiety in the face of climate change.5
While these new words can help us gain a better understanding of our emotions in light of the ecological crisis, these emotions remain complex, entangled and difficult to grasp. When I was in the Arctic, I was grieving for the loss of a loved one as well as the environmental degradation I was experiencing. My grief was multifaceted, complex and nonlinear. In the Arctic, I heard the glaciers carve and the ice melt but I also heard the seabirds out over the ice and the auks nesting in the cliffs. In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes “the future is dark, a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”6 Through grief, I learnt to say goodbye, to hold onto memories and to say hello again. If grieving is honouring death as well as a celebration of life, can actively grieving be an act of hope?
Filmmaking can be a cathartic process. I use my practice as a way of emotionally processing personal experiences. I’m interested in how films can provide a space for healing. Eventual Horizon is an audiovisual expression of my own grief through which I aim to create an intimate space for collective hope in light of environmental change.
Eventual Horizon was produced by l’Espace Croisé, Centre d’Art Contemporain and is currently exhibited there as part of my solo exhibition Émotions Terranaissantes until the 10th December 2023. From the 23rd November until the 17th February, Eventual Horizon will also be presented at LMNO Gallery in Brussels.
Research & Development in the Arctic was facilitated by The Arctic Circle – Artists & Scientist Residency and supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
With the support of Sustainable Art, a contribution was made towards the project Urban Forest which will go towards the plantation of a Miyawaki forest in a school in Grez-Doiceau, Belgium.
Written, Directed and Produced by Elise Guillaume
Production – Espace Croisé, Centre d’Art Contemporain
Consulting Producers – Chloe Abrahams, Marie de Ganay
Cinematography, Editing, Sound & Narration – Elise Guillaume
Additional Cinematography – John Janssens, Edouard Outters
Colour Grading – John Janssens
Sound Mix & Additional Sound – Mélia Roger
Special Thanks – Marius Atumulesei, Sergei Chernikov, Olivia Crowe, Jeremy Chen, Sarah Gerats, Jekyll n’ Hyde, Tuomas Kauko, Laura Mené, Inês Neto Dos Santos, Patricia Petersen, regiment, Robin Wattiaux, JungEun Yang.
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1 – Gunkel, H., Nigianni, C. and Söderbäck, F. (2013) ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’, in Undutiful daughters: New directions in feminist thought and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2 – Gunkel, H., Nigianni, C. and Söderbäck, F. (2013) ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’, in Undutiful daughters: New directions in feminist thought and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
3 – Alessandro Massazza (7 November 2022) Wellcome. Available at: https://wellcome.org/news/explained-how-climate-change-affects-mental-health. (Accessed 7 November 2023).
4 – Albrecht. Glenn (2019) Earth Emotions, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London.
5 – Alessandro Massazza (7 November 2022) Wellcome. Available at: https://wellcome.org/news/explained-how-climate-change-affects-mental-health. (Accessed 7 November 2023).
6 – Solnit, R. (2016) Hope in the dark: Untold histories, wild possibilities. Chicago, IL: Haymart Books.
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