even a dead star can be a lighthouse
Video installation / Short film, 11:30, 2025, 2K ProResHQ stero / DCP 5.1
Concept, camera, sound, editing: Maria Ångerman
Sound Design: Sergio González Cuervo
Scanning: Artturi Mutanen / Helsinki Film & Gear
Cast: bladderwrack, seagrass, filamentous algea, shrimp, mudcrab,
barnacle and others
Made in collaboration with Pro Artibus, Åbo Akademi marine research station
Funded by Svenska Kulturfoden, Taike, Svenska Litteratursällskapet
What might unfold at the edge of the Baltic Sea in a near future shaped by eutrophication and declining oxygen levels? Informed by symbiosis and the plasticity of aquatic life, the film offers a meditation on the coping mechanisms of submerged organisms as they respond to shifting environmental conditions.
Combining underwater footage with cameraless 16 mm phytograms made with algae and seagrass, the work moves between microscopic observation and drifting marine landscapes. Whispering voices form a speculative language – algae reflecting on altered conditions and the terms of survival. The installation proposes the sea as a space of fragility, adaptation, and symbiotic persistence: a site where loss and continuity are not opposites but conditions of the same ongoing negotiation.
_____FILM EXCERPT