Gaspard Renault

This project continues and concludes a multimodal multi-species research on the affective logics of wildlife rehabilitation practices, based on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork led with Bolivian wildlife conservation NGO Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY). The film tells the story of Rusber, a twenty-five year old animal caretaker, as highway construction project forces him to relocate the primate sanctuary where he grew up, and as his commitment to his adoptive mother and to the animals he cares for comes into conflict with his personal and professional aspirations. Through Rusber’s story the film reveals and questions some of modernity’s most fundamental oppositions: humanity/animality, wild/domestic, protection/exploitation. More specifically, it explores the links between interspecific attachment and the social, political and environmental dynamics that shape Bolivian landscapes of tropical forest. As such it brings forth arguments for a multi-species anthropology of, through and by film.