Perspective of an Oyster Video

Initially, we set out to film an oyster’s life from its perspective. Both texts we read in class, A Geography of Oysters and Consider the Oyster personified the oyster. Often, the lectures did as well. We frequently heard about the difficult and highly sexual life of a creature we consume in a single bite.

After we gathered our footage we were able to consume the images from a distance, which changed our direction. The footage at Hama Hama and Our Table were extremely disconnected: once again the cultivation and the consumption alive in  stark contrast. This was a bit startling – we had just been intimately involved in the production of the same oysters we were eating, but the emotions, colors and body language in the images were disjointed. We decided a surrealist approach, or a more irrational and dreamlike video would support this realization.

It’s extremely rare (maybe impossible) for us to witness the entirety of an oyster’s life. Just as one can never understand another person’s experiences, we won’t ever be able to fully understand the life that a food or item or image we consume has lived. This deepened and disarranged my understanding of terroir.

Annie