Moving with Plants - A year of correspondence with Hackney Marshes

A Year of Correspondence with Hackney Marshes presents a parallel process of correspondence between mover Claire Loussouarn, filmmaker Dominique Rivoal, and the living landscape of Hackney Marshes.

Returning month after month to Leyton Marshes, a distinct area within the marshes’ nature reserve and common land in multicultural London, the dancer–filmmaker dyad enters into an ongoing exchange with this ancient land — its shifting light, seasonal cycles, non-human inhabitants and human passers-by.

As the environment transforms through seasonal change, Claire moves with the plants; Dominique relates through the handheld camera. Their shared practice unfolds as a back-and-forth attunement — an embodied dialogue between mover, camera and marshland.

Developed over six years of sustained encounter, this film focuses on the final year of that process, 2024. The durational and iterative commitment to returning has enabled a deep listening to both internal and external landscapes, allowing the dyad to enter into resonance with each other and with the ecology of the marshes.

The notion of correspondence, drawn from anthropologist Tim Ingold, offers a framework for understanding this practice. Rather than conceiving relation as intersubjectivity between separate entities, Ingold describes correspondence as moving along together in time and space — lines of life unfolding in mutual responsiveness. Here, movement, camera and marsh co-evolve in shared duration.

Filmed handheld in the emergence of the moment — at times including camera shake, blur and shifting focus — the images foreground moments of heightened connection between seer and seen. The camera does not stand outside the encounter but participates in it.

The film features immersive three-dimensional sound design and can be experienced on a 3D sound system. The spatialised audio extends the field of correspondence beyond the image, enveloping the audience within the sonic ecology of the marshes — wind moving through grasses, birds in flight, distant urban traces — situating the viewer as a listener within the shared environment.

Dominique Rivoal developed this somatic filming approach during her doctoral research in Screendance, weaving together film and dance with somatic movement practices to cultivate alternative ways of perceiving and relating.

Claire Loussouarn — movement artist, herbalist, filmmaker and anthropologist — centres her practice on releasing the feral potential of the body and expanding what it means to be human in dialogue with landscape and non-human beings. Hackney Marshes has been a fundamental collaborator in this unfolding inquiry. Her book How to Be Feral: Movement Practices to Re-wild Your Body shares reflections and practices that reconnect inner and outer wildness.