Portraits of Earth
2024
Portraits of Earth is a project that investigates world-building and spatial storytelling through the medium of large-format panoramas. Long before the emergence of cinema, panoramic images marked a pivotal development in visual narrative techniques—immersive, expansive, and deeply evocative.
Building on this historical foundation, the project embraces speculative worldviews to confront urgent questions posed by the climate crisis. Through the lens of science fiction, we construct imagined landscapes that reflect our environmental anxieties, hopes, and contradictions.
These digital terrains unfold as animated, single-take loops projected on a spacious scale, transforming virtual space into sites of contemplation and imaginative engagement. Portraits of Earth invites viewers to navigate these fictional yet familiar worlds—spaces where ecological reflection and visual storytelling intertwine.
Vanessa Bauerfeind
Erdentanz (2024)
Animation, 16:9, 0’00’’, color, sound
Through a sensitive observation of the human body caught between progress and nature, this performative animated film explores the fractured state of life. Centered around the portraits of two women, it questions cultural patterns of movement, the interaction between body and space, and the tension between utopia and dystopia.
Lisanne Immke
Femorphosis (2024)
Animation, 15.100 x 2160 px, 4K, loop, color, sound
Through millennia of suppression, resistance, and liberation, the individual sheds the layers that once defined her—and in doing so, ascends into a higher being. What events must transpire to usher us into such an intersectional feminist utopia?
Jeanne Meret Weishaupt
Synbios, (2024)
Video, 16:9, color, sound
Synbios (from Ancient Greek σύν “together” and βίος “life”) is an immersive installation that interrogates the parity of life between humans and nature. After a speculative voyage into the future, the viewer awakens to find themselves before a colossal, otherworldly plant. As the camera alternates between intimate close-ups of human skin and verdant leaf, parallel textures emerge and gradually entwine. Ultimately, the boundaries dissolve and the two elements fuse into a singular new form—neither wholly real nor entirely imagined.
Ayana Welskop
Supra Commute, (2024)
Animation, 4:3, color, sound
In the near future, breakthroughs in physics will offer a thrilling travel experience on high-speed trains.
Charlotte Wiegand
Level 310, (2024)
Animation, 16:9, color, sound
Due to numerous climate disasters, prolonged droughts, and a growing population, people are compelled to rethink their cities.