As the title suggests, this film is an outline for The Bonding project. The Bonding is a body of artworks that have resulted from the documentation of a 2,5-year bonding with a group of farmed salmons at the Institute of Marine Research, in Norway.

The Bonding is the central part of the project Transhemispheria, which explores cross-hemispherical relations, with regard to different tensions: the insertion, aquaculture and impact of salmon; the anthropocentric management and manipulation of living marine resources, and the coexistence and disappearance of ancestral knowledge, from origin to destination in the contemporary context.

This is a 16mm film documentation of a preservation process with palaeontologists from the University of Bergen (UiB), whose aim was to research on salmon aquaculture, as well as to understand ethical and political contexts around salmon consumption and ancestral significance. One of the tasks was the extraction of otoliths pairs from farmed salmons; unique crystals or bio-minerals that serve as the chemical diary of a fish. This sparked a reflection on how the microscopic crystals in the film material are reconfigured under a photochemical process.

This outline aims to translate the Cartesian techno-antiseptic environment surrounding a farmed salmon bone preservation, through a grainy, imperfect 16mm film aesthetic. It is accompanied by an excerpt from a conversation with Sámi artist Ánde Somby in Tromsø, 2019.

– Concept: Michelle-Marie Letelier
– Director of Photography: Carlos Vasquez
– Production and Editing: Carlos Vasquez & Michelle-Marie Letelier
– Post-production: Muscle Temple Lab

Exhibited at:
– 2021, Videonale.18 Fluid States Solid Matter, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
– 2021-2022, Zin-Ex, Tabakalera, San Sebastián, Spain

Screened at:
– 2019, We Are Ocean, Futurium & State Studio, Berlin, Germany
– 2019, Interface, Act Hall, Osaka, Japan
– 2020, We Are Ocean, Plage du Prophète, Marseille, France
– 2020-2021, KunstTV, online
– 2021, We Are Ocean, IUCN World Congress, Marseille, France
– 2021, Love Letters from a Burning Building, Persons Projects, Berlin, Germany