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Paper short abstract:

This paper shares insights from the making of the artist’s short film Ritual of Rejoin investigating the spiritual practise of a speculative society living on the edge of a global flood. The process is built on an experiential study of immersing oneself to the speculative conditions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper shares insights, methods and inspirations from the making of the artist’s short film Ritual of Rejoin investigating a ritual of an oceanic spirituality inspired by the hydro-feminist posthumanism theory. It is about surrender, fear, re-birth and immigration in the context of a society living on the edge of a global flood. The speculative film depicts a group of women performing a ritual of this society to re-immigrate to the ocean. An unexpected attendee of the ritual starts the turn of events that changes the path of humanity towards a cetaceanic dream as the narrator reveals their identity in a meditative poem. While the ideation and the inspiration of the film has started with an internalised anxiety towards the rising ocean levels, the speculative fiction process is built on an experiential study of immersing oneself to the conditions that requires to think, act and feel from an imagined condition of reality. The process explained offers a new perspective on how to use auto-ethnography and performance for speculation, while the final form suggests a framework of a guided meditation investigating the ideas of experiential moving image, healing and posthuman imagination.