All That Changes You. Metamorphosis - shot on location at Palazzo Te - showcases internationally renowned actors Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie. The two actors take centre stage playing the roles of prophetic, otherworldly celestial beings, as if brought to life from the fresco covered walls of the palazzo.
All That Changes You. Metamorphosis takes as its starting point Renaissance architect Guilio Romano's masterpiece, Palazzo Te, and uses the lavish palace and frescoed walls to explore and
reconsider themes of metamorphosis, philosophy, anthropology and ecology within the framework
of the contemporary world. The film moves between locations to include Charles Jencks' extraordinary post-modern, Cosmic House in London and the lush Redwood National and State Park in California expanding the consideration of the ethereal, transcendental and notions of time.
The Palazzo's striking frescos were an inspiration to create two goddesses - played by Gwendoline Christie and Sheila Atim - drawing from literary sources of Donna Haraway's philosophical and political work Staying with the Trouble (2016) that challenges dominant narratives of apocalypse and of Naomi Mitchison's novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman in which a scientist / time traveller tells of her experiences researching, communicating with, and falling in love with extraterrestrial life. Sheila Atim's character is based on a 1993 speculative fiction novel Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, prophetic work set in a post-apocalyptic Earth affected by climate change and social inequality. The final script was developed collaboratively by Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, and Vladimir Seput, bringing together distinct intellectual and aesthetic perspectives.
Both protagonists time travel across a series of architectural spaces that function as visual metaphors and characters and delineate different temporalities - from the 16th-century Palazzo Te with Giulio Romano's remarkable frescoes, through the postmodernist 20th-century Charles Jencks's Cosmic House in London, to a futuristic glass "spaceship" located between England designed by Richard Found, and the media art collection pavilion created by Herzog & de Meuron for the Kramlich Collection. These environments have their own signature.
As our time travelling protagonists cross different temporalities, they will morph into different identities while they search beyond an anthropocentric world view and discuss how to share the planet with nature and other beings, providing the space for the representation of non-human perspectives.
The ten-screen film installation constructs an oppositional and self-sustaining repertoire of images generating its own poetics. By reconfiguring the presentation through an architectural choreography, the language of images disrupts the narrative telos that shapes perception.
The film offers an alternative visual grammar reclaiming nature's agency where memory, poetry, and imagination converge in an act of resistance against the planetary destruction by visually reconfiguring the present and future, creating what Judith Butler calls the counter- imaginary.
