This film is the result of a is the documentation and preservation of a relationship formed between a human and a group of breeding Atlantic salmon, raised under controlled, techno-scientific conditions throughout their programmed 2.5-year life cycle.

This process began in December 2019, with 100 Salmo salar eggs hatched at the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) station in Matre, Norway, and culminated in March 2022, with 16 salmon.

When not engaged in direct on-site interaction documented on 16mm film, both salmon and human were able to observe one another periodically through an underwater webcam and monitor installed in our respective environments—the tank and the studio—creating an additional layer of documentation.

The COVID pandemic, unfolding during this process, prompted a deep reflection on the shared experience of confinement—both human and salmon. It also profoundly influenced the project’s development and content: travel restrictions led to trip cancellations and denied entries, the forced elimination of fry, and lockdown conditions that mirrored each other on both sides.

The process itself became the heart of the project, exposing tensions and contradictions that demanded to be faced. In continuous dialogue with a scientific community working under immense pressure to refine Norway’s salmon industry, The Bonding emerged as a counterpoint—a space where sensorial and emotional understandings could coexist with empirical knowledge. This animistic experience thus extended beyond an interspecies communication, resonating with philosopher Martin Lee Mueller’s idea that ‘it undermines moral or epistemological monism and offers a pluralism of ways of knowing, as well as a pluralism of the moral imagination’*

To bond with a creature whose natural integrity belongs to the deep sea and rivers, yet existing today within systems of human cultivation, is to confront a mirror of our own condition as bioengineered, self-aware beings drifting in the abyss of our own techno-genesis.

* Martin Lee-Mueller, Being Salmon, Being Human, p. 116. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017

• Exhibited at:
  – 2022-2023, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile
• – 2025-2026, Hå Gamle Prestegard, Nærbø, Norway
•  

• Screened at:
  – 2023, Richmond Cultural Centre, Richmond BC, Canada
•  

• – Production: Michelle-Marie Letelier & Carlos Vasquez
  – Cinematography: Carlos Vasquez
  – Edition and sound: Carlos Vasquez & Michelle-Marie Letelier
  – Sound design: Titus Maderlechner
  – Post-production: Muscle Temple Lab
  – Technical assistance underwater system: Carlo Crovato
  – Infrastructure and technical management IMR: Lise Dyrhovden, Ivar Helge Matre, Tone Knappskog, Torfinn Aga, Arnor Gullanger, Linda Neset, Abhinay Nalla, Simon B. Flavell, Tone Vägseth, Espen Heggland
  – Animal welfare: Lise Dyrhovden, Ivar Helge Matre, Per Gunnar Fjelldal, Tone Knappskog, Arnor Gullanger, Tone Vägseth, Linda Neset
  – Logistics: Ragnar Nortverdt, Ivar Helge Matre, Rosie Peligro, Magnhild Rørtveit