Shape Shifting (2015) dir. Elke Marhfer, Mikhail Lylov

In order to challenge the understanding of nature situated apart from human, the film Shape Shifting suggest another arrangement where human and nonhuman join relations and productively interact. It outlines a cartography of a specific landscape, which exhibits a high natural diversity and is called satoyama in Japanese. Located on the border zone between mountain and arable land, the landscape is formed by a land-use based on observation and experimentation with nature and is accomplished over a relatively long time span by the methods of observing (mi) and trying (tameshi). The method of observation and try out was first articulated in the tim e of the Edo period and unified in the phrase mitameshi. Marked by the mutual effects of nonhuman and human life forms, satoyama can be regarded as a manifold of assemblages of transformations, appearing on the plane of a landscape.