Sannindi (Old Norse: the truth)
An ode to the death of Nature.
Sannindi is a collaboration between philosopher and artist, Naina Eira and film director, Christina Amundsen.
Never have we felt this unrooted from our origins. Be it in our culture, landscape, religion or lack of it. Trudging through a chaotic plurality with the responsibility of creating our own meaning. We desperately grasp for a way back to a feeling of home. But the truth seems just out of reach, concealed from us. Civilisation scrambles upon the foundations of concepts through language, separated and meshed simultaneously.
Sannindi traverses through the mergence of historical language, music and visual art as an experimental film poem. Representing the space between the exploration of nature and the mergence with it, outside the concept of nature. Heidegger said “Language is the house of Being”. To explore its origins is to explore our own origins. However, the sounds that separate us from the externally perceived world keep us from experiencing what is. Can we utter words of your ancestors to go beyond language?
“The poetry is an experiment where I am bridging the Indo-Nordic, temporal-cultural landscape. The language created is what I call the ‘root language’. The words have roots in both Sanskrit and Proto-Germanic. Surprisingly, they tend to sound similar to one another- creating a probable linguistic soundscape, i.e; an Icelandic person finds the poem familiar, just as well as an Indian who has had basic Sanskrit training. However, the ‘word-sounds’ lend themselves to a ritual practice, where there isn't a necessity of comprehending the meaning of the words, I.e; abstracting away from the abstraction that language tends to create. I wish to put a light on the ambiguity of floating between being the outsider to nature and the one who is nature in itself.” - Naina Eira
The poem in the film:
Sannindi: An ode to the Death of Nature
Feel, withdraw, conceal, reveal
Neatly folding time and space
Fiddling with the moist soils of my terror
Caressing the streams of your intimate love
It frees the found and grips the lost
lost again, found again, always within its grips
Time plays and it finds its space
The play finds the wit of the nimble ones
Death walks hand in hand with life
I stroke your wooden bones and you consume my moist gushes
Our inter-penetration flows through the concealed and revealed.
I emerge and beckon your tidy streams into my untimely hair
Washing away your abstract conceptions of my existence
Stray from me and stay with me
My freedom is shown through the truth of my inevitable prison
There is no truth..
Only the abyss and the acceptance of my fate tied with yours
Leave me, entangled in your meshes
- Naina Eira
The art project is an experiment to comprehend the human-nature connection, in the age of the anthropocene.
Concept and Idea: Naina Eira
Director: Christina Amundsen
Cinematographer: Suraj Singh Thakur
Editor: Christina Amundsen
Poetry: Naina Eira
Music: Jonas Lorentzen & Sebastian Gainsborough
Actress: Rachel Varghese
Assistant: Mathilda Thompson Emily Davies
