Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit

Feral Practice's Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit draws resonance between themes of power, fragility and exploitation in Kent’s landscapes, and the forces at work in Russell Hoban’s cult 1980 novel Riddley Walker. In the post-apocalyptic world of the book, inhabitants of ‘Inland’ (East Kent) mythologise the fragments of a lost civilization destroyed by human ambition. In 2020 we experienced profound insight into our own vulnerabilities, and the unpredictable consequences of our exploitative relationship with animals and the land. Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit, alive to the climate crisis, global disease vectors, species extinction and postcolonial extraction, explores how humans obliterate and control nonhuman worlds. It probes human sites of power in East Kent, including Faversham’s explosive past, Thanet Earth’s constant day, and the unfathomable nuclear futures of Dungeness. And in adjunct spaces to these behemoths, it finds wild creatures living circumscribed lives, often in isolation from their kind. Esi Eshun: “The work plays with layers of awareness, where something not quite apprehended rubs up against more conscious evocations of place and meaning.” Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit lingers on the marginalized lifeworlds of the easily overlooked, through intimate footage of rare flora and fauna such as the Brown-Banded Carder Bee Bombus humilis and the Shining Ram’s Horn Snail Segmentina nitida. Video, even if microscopic, can never access a nonhuman reality, but it brings this tiny snail to fill our screens - and perhaps our minds - with its blurry, shining dance. Pulsation, rhythm - a feeling that something unspoken and determined and absolute is pulling you - runs through the film. Pestova’s ethereal music, inspired by the decay of atomic particles and played on a magnetic resonator piano, slides into hypnotic field sound recordings, suggestive of new ways of listening to place. A dry, factual commentary is interspersed with poetic and emotive, demanding that they converse. Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit is available to watch online through Estuary 2021. Credits With thanks to: Nikki Gamman, The Bumblebee Conservation Trust Chloe Sadler, Kent Wildlife Trust Natural England, Stodmarsh Nature Reserve Kent Wildlife Trust, Oare Marshes The Dungeness Estate Written and filmed by Feral Practice Voices: Esi Eshun, Fiona MacDonald, Jonathan Ashley Music – Xenia Pestova Bennett, Atomic Legacies, Diatribe Records Additional Sound: Feral Practice, John Holland, Darren Nixon Partnered by Folkestone Fringe and supported with ACE funding HD video, 26:21 mins