Anne Duk Hee Jordan (KR/DE) and Pauline Doutreluingne (BE/DE)
Brakfesten / La Grande Bouffe
HD film, 28:14 min, sound
2022
Brakfesten / La Grande Bouffe , Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Pauline Doutreluingne , HD film, 28:14 min, sound , 2022
Brakfesten / La Grande Bouffe is the final chapter of a long-term artistic investigation into a symbiotic forest ecosystem. Developed around a public sculpture that slowly transformed within the forest, the work culminates in this macro-cinematic exploration of life, decay, and regeneration.
Referencing Marco Ferreri’s cult film La Grande Bouffe (1973), which satirises bourgeois excess through acts of consumption, the film shifts attention to the forest, where consumption becomes an ecological necessity. Set in Swedish elm forests threatened by Dutch elm disease, it follows the intimate relationship between elm bark beetles, fungi, and trees. What appears as destruction gradually reveals itself as part of an intricate cycle of transformation.
Through microscopic imagery, the film challenges the notion of disease as purely destructive, proposing instead that parasites, fungi, insects, and decay are indispensable actors within the forest’s complex web of interdependence. Brakfesten – La Grande Bouffe invites us to reconsider decomposition not as the end of life, but as one of its essential conditions.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan is a Berlin-based artist and Professor of Environmental Intervention at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK). Through film, installation, performance, and sculptural environments, her work explores ecological transformation, multispecies entanglements, and the agency of living systems. Combining scientific research with speculative storytelling, she has exhibited internationally at major museums, biennials, and art institutions.
Pauline Doutreluingne is a curator, filmmaker, and professor based in Berlin. She is Professor of Spatial Strategies at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin and Artistic Director of Kunstverein Arnsberg. Her work brings together contemporary art, film, ecology, and architecture, creating research-based projects that investigate the relationships between landscapes, environmental transformation, and more-than-human worlds.