Breathing Matter(s) – Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
silent green presents
Solo exhibition I Betonhalle
18 July – 24 August 2025
Opening: Thursday, July 17, Doors: 7 pm, Start: 7:30 pm
Opening hours: Mo–Fr, 2–8 pm / Sa-So, 11 am–8 pm
Entry free
This summer, silent green presents Breathing Matter(s), a major solo retrospective of the artists Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, tracing the duo's artistic development and presenting their most important works.
Paravel and Castaing-Taylor gained international recognition in 2012 with their first collaboration, Leviathan. Few artists in recent years have so radically reinvented the cinematic experience. Formally, aesthetically and programmatically, their visually stunning works shatter the boundaries between anthropology, documentary film and visual art, subverting traditional, anthropocentric orders of representation and visibility.
Cinematic immersion, a strong focus on sensory and physical perception, and a deep engagement with lived experience are at the very heart of their work - whether it be the bloody daily grind of deep-sea fishing, the repulsive fantasies of a cannibal, the surreal dreamscapes of the world's most garrulous sleeptalker, or the sublime visions of the pulsating interior of the human body.
We’re both recovering anthropologists. After we received our doctorates,
we became progressively more dispirited with the discipline, above all
its aspiration to represent the vagaries of cultural meaning
and the magnitude of lived experience around the world through words alone,
and especially propositional prose. We are somatic creatures before we are
linguifying ones. Independently—we didn’t know each other then—we both felt
a desire to retreat from language, and limit ourselves to images and sounds.
Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
in conversation with Hila Peleg in We are Somatic Creatures
The result is a radical departure from the narrative and formal conventions of the documentary film genre. No explanatory information, no dialogue, no commentary, no narration that distances or categorises what is being shown. They don't follow a script or a set of research questions, but are guided by what they see and feel.
Entry to the exhibition is free. An accompanying programme of artist talks and film screenings will offer further perspectives on the themes of the exhibition. More information to follow.
Véréna Paravel
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Véréna Paravel is an anthropologist working across film, video, and photography. Her work pushes beyond traditional boundaries, exploring the poetics and politics of the body, the physical and perceptual limits of human experience, interspecies perspectives, sensory ethnography and new ecological frameworks. Since 2008, she has been a researcher and educator at Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL).
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Born in Liverpool, UK, Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an anthropologist whose work conjugates art’s negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life and an engagement with the pressing ecological and political challenges of our day. Since 2002, he has been teaching at Harvard University, where he founded and continues to direct the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), which focuses on capturing the sensory and embodied aspects of human experience rather than conventional narratives.
Collaborative Work
Together, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have developed a new cinematic language that merges anthropological research with artistic experimentation. Their films showcase their radical aesthetic and sensory-driven storytelling. Among their acclaimed works are Leviathan (2012), somniloquies (2017), Caniba (2018) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022). Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s work has been showcased in leading museums, biennales, and festivals worldwide, challenging audiences to see and experience the world in radical new ways.
Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL)
The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University is one of the most interesting production facilities for documentary film and cinematic research today. Informed by a skepticism towards the cultural legacy of colonial cinema, the institute has been working since 2006 to renew the visual practice of ethnographic fieldwork and film. The static knowledge gained through observation is replaced by the montage and visual aesthetics of sensory events.
The solo exhibition Breathing Matter(s) is a project of silent green Film Feld Forschung gGmbH.
Funded by the LOTTO-Stiftung Berlin.
