Monólogo Colectivo

In a community of zoos and animal rescue centers across Argentina, as histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s touch is instantly recognisable. Prehensile, her camera always has us discover the world gropingly: through the ground we walk on and the hands stretching out, hands feeding or poking through wire fencing, those that clasp and restore, hands that that care, touch and build relationships. With Monólogo Colectivo, she continues to explore the institutionalised relationships between humans and the natural world.  While Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (2019) evoked museological conservation, her second feature focuses on several Argentine zoos, primarily, those founded in city centres in the late 19th century, and which hide their increasingly polemical side behind renovations and new names such as bio- or eco-parks. Without omitting to film the administrative and architectural details of their carceral infrastructure and their founding colonial systems, the essential is conveyed in tender moments of interaction between species. In the apprehension of hands and minds trying to invent a language for their exchanges, capturing in passing the frustration they create. Meaningful bonds are created through the zookeepers’ devotion to the caged animals shown in the film, as well as in their attempts to transcend language and the barriers between the animals. But also a deep unfathomable sadness linked as much to a universal condition as to the spirit of time. The film is only accusatory inasmuch as its open, fragmented, complex and precise structure questions our way of seeing the world  and has us ponder on our difficult relationship with the living.

Antoine Thirion