The feral film habit of OJOBOCA

Abstract

This essay examines three films and adjacent performance (The Masked Monkeys 2015; Comfort Stations 2018; and Her Name Was Europa 2020) by the Berlin-based filmmaking duo Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy, who together call themselves OJOBOCA. Drawing on the broadly transdisciplinary scholarly treatments and decolonial imperatives of ferality as a site of human and non-human relationality, I contextualize OJOBOCA’s analogue body of work featuring animal subjects as a feral film habit. In describing a feral film habit through OJOBOCA’s work, I also engage a media archaeological concern with making media histories present in practice alongside the complex of aesthetic, ecological, political and economic sensibilities emergent in contemporary photochemical filmmaking and laboratory culture in the (post-)digital age. Overall, my aim is to clarify an experimental project that points towards possible more-than-human cinema-based forms of collectivity and invites novel forms of cinema-based life.