Inspired by a medieval text in which speaking animals demand interspecies justice, Bestiari is a hypnagogic environment inhabited by sounds and images of creatures from natural and imagined Catalan landscapes.

Bestiari dialogues with the medieval text Disputa de l’ase [Dispute of the Donkey], written in 1417 by Anselm Turmeda, one of the founders of Catalan literature. Disputa de l’ase tells the story of a group of animals who trial a man who can understand their languages. Tired of being mistreated, the animals question anthropocentrism, the belief that humans are superior to other animals.

Bestiari pays tribute to the animals of the medieval text by featuring dreamlike sounds and images of bats, bees, dolphins, donkeys, elephants and other creatures, recorded in their natural habitats. Featuring Ambisonics 3D infrasound spatialization, Bestiari presents frequencies that are beyond the human sensory realm, inducing a sense of physical closeness with these animals and landscapes and propitiating sensorial modes of interspecies discovery. A large film installation, derived from each species’ spectrum of vision, creates hypnotic encounters with the various animals and environments, further dissolving the relationship between reality and dream.

Carlos Casas makes films, installations and sound environments that pay attention to places and communities that exist in symbiotic modes, portraying the relationship between beings and spaces. With Bestiari, he proposes dreaming as a form of interspecies communication, enhancing the need to attend to multiple perspectives, senses and agencies. Bestiari is a project about where to find hope today, observing the communalities of the present with the past, exploring the role of the unconscious in ecology and proposing ways to connect with other lives and ways of living.