LUMA Arles / Delta

At the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, LUMA Arles is screening Delta, a previously unseen film that filmmaker and artist Verena Paravel made at the museum’s request.

Delta, a film shot in the wetlands of the Camargue

The work forms one chapter of Cosmofonia, Verena Paravel’s research project. Shot in the heart of the Rhône delta, a singular environment, it focuses on the delicate, frequently hidden lives of the numerous species that make their home in the Camargue’s wetlands.

An immersive sensory experience that decentres human perception

For Verena Paravel, a landscape is a dense web of relationships, in which human and non-human existences are woven together. Innovative filming techniques and experimental sound work combine into an immersive sensory experience. Human sight no longer holds the centre: viewers come across other rhythms, other powers to act and other ways of being present.

The film depicts a world where species, bodies and surroundings blur into one another at their edges, and where living and dying are part of ongoing transformation. Its approach unsettles established habits of perception and treats cinema as a means of reaching out to other modes of existence. Image and sound act as instruments of attention, presenting the delta as a place where several timeframes and life cycles exist side by side.

Film as a medium of contact with a polyphonic world

Delta continues Verena Paravel’s radical investigation of cinema, which she uses to connect with a plural, many-voiced world where the Earth is inhabited in countless ways. In her hands, film becomes a medium of contact. Her work deeply reshapes the sensory and conceptual landscape of contemporary practice.