Camille & Ulysse - Officlal trailer

Camille & Ulysse is a film by Diana Toucedo with the philosophers Vinciane Despret and Donna Haraway, and adapted from the texts “The Camille Stories” (published in Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016) and Despret’s Autobiographie d’un poulpe (Actes Sud, 2021).
Co-produced by the CCCB (Barcelona) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), in collaboration with Fabbula, Camille & Ulysse was commissioned especially for the exhibition “Science Friction, life among companion species” curated by Maria Ptqk, held at the CCCB from June 12th to November 28th 2021.
Sometime in the future, Camille & Ulysse recount the intertwined stories of the first generations of their communities of humans and non-humans, the communities of compost. Camille joins symbiotically with migrating Monarch butterflies, whose routes of migration and sites of habitation are endangered across the United States, Mexico and Canada. Ulysse, as do all the Ulysses in the community, experiments with the possibility of living in the presence of already extinct octopuses, by learning their gestures, language and highly particular forms of sensitivity.
Filmed as an oral tale and correspondence between the two storytellers and their fables, the film follows the communities’ ways of living and dying on a damaged planet as well as their ever expanding fluency in a new scientific field, therolinguistics, or the study of animal languages. The storytellers, in concert with their symbiotic companions, become more attuned to possibilities for flourishing for both tentacular and metamorphic beings.