Conversation with a Cactus, Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky, 2017, 45:00

Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky (FR/DE) are an artist/film director duo based in Berlin and Paris. They’ve directed together several short and mid-length films exploring specific social-political situations through the prism of altered states of consciousness, delirium and ecstasy. Combining their interests in cinema and sonic anthropology, their films investigate the multiplicity of the self through a spiral of metamorphoses that interrogate our power relation—always shifting—to the ‘Other’ (‘the enemy, the plant, the animal, the spirit, the dead’). Their works have been presented at numerous international film festivals and art institutions such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, FID Marseille, International Film Festival Torino, DocLisboa, Ann Arbor, CCCB Barcelona, MAMCO Geneva, MAF Tokyo, Centre Pompidou Paris and HdKW Berlin. Recipients of various recent research grants in Japan, Greece and Mexico, they did residencies such as Capacete (Rio de Janeiro), Guemcheon (Seoul), Hors Les Murs (Mississippi), Izolyatsia (formerly in Donetsk, Ukraine) and have received the European Media Art Festival award for their film work. The Sun Experiment (Ether Echoes) (2014) and Conversation with a Cactus (2017). Bom Dia Books recently published their first monograph One Head Too Many.