Her Name Was Europa

“No doubt it is an unusual idea to resurrect a dead animal”. The quote is from Lutz Heck, a German zoologist, author, and friend of Hermann Göring, who dreamed of resurrecting the aurochs, an ancestor of modern cattle, and having it roam through primeval Aryan forests once again. Animal photos from one of Heck’s books structure the film, together with endearingly homemade intertitles on plastic transparencies, but Heck is not the only one to feel the aurochs’ strange pull. Present-day scientists in the Netherlands are equally seeking to recreate this extinct beast, albeit within an entirely different ideological framework, examining similar breeds, extracting genes, commissioning drawings and models; but, as an illustrator remarks, you can’t create anything that’s gone, only something that looks like it. And all the ravishing black-and-white celluloid images of cattle suggest that the directors are just as fascinated by the aurochs, even if their thematic interest wanders to ever greater abstraction too. Like the two sets of film stock used to shoot the same procedure, like the different covers of Heck’s book, like the vast rainforest reproduced in a Brandenburg hangar: a copy can impress, deceive or seduce, but the original is another thing entirely. (James Lattimer)

In the presence of Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy.

Anja Dornieden, Juan David González: AWE SHOCKS (2011, K), ORO PARECE (2012, K), EIGENHEIM (2012, K), A FLEA’S SKIN WOULD BE TOO BIG FOR YOU (2013, K), GENTE PERRA (2014, K), WOLKENSCHATTEN (2014, K), THE MASKED MONKEYS (2015, K), HELIOPOLIS HELIOPOLIS (2016, K), COMFORT STATIONS (2018, K), THE SKIN IS GOOD (2018, K)