Thérèse Anna Rafter

“Nature is not somehow free of the power relations in society; rather, it is the most political of all entities.”

Nature Is a Battlefield - Razmig Keucheyan

HYBRID

Set in the Belgian countryside, Hybrid depicts human-bred hybrid falcons in pursuit of a wild crow. The chase is encountered from a literal bird’s-eye view. A heightened sense of spatial immersion minimises the fact that this footage was captured by a GoPro carried by the falcon itself. This perspective creates a proximity that becomes almost indistinguishable from identification, where observation approaches a form of becoming-with. By adopting the falcon’s viewpoint, the work evokes the immersive logic of virtual reality, collapsing the distance between observer and participant.

Originally produced for scientific research by François and Valerie Lorrain, the footage is recontextualised as a cinematic work. Through editing and reframing, the artist transforms this 2011 archival material into spectacle, accompanied by a bespoke score by Irish composer J Colleran. The work becomes a reflection on how we encounter the human construction of “nature”, connecting directly to questions of perception, desire, and mediation.

In the context of ecological crisis, we are increasingly seduced by bucolic and idealised images of nature—not only through still and moving images, but through expanding forms of immersive technology and virtual experience. Hybrid points to the extent to which our encounters with the living world are conceptually and technologically mediated, raising questions about how these forms of mediation reshape our understanding of human-animal relations.