Zara Sands & Ella Yolande

2024

Vault is a moving image series, offering a glimpse into a speculative seed vault. The vault is viewed and inspected through a digital interface with ever shifting value metrics, demonstrating the transience and futility of human attempts to select and disentangle the complexities of bodies and lifeforms.

Vault was created at the culmination of a residency shared by Zara Sands and Ella Yolande at Ugly Duck, researching choreography, digital sculpture and expanded cinema practices. Their work together focused on exploring body-environment binaries through the lens of queer ecology, and how colonial botanical science practices feed into the continued stratification of bodies and lifeforms.

Human bio banks and seed banks become speculative sites to explore preservation, mutuality, categorisation and the problems of body /environment binaries. As Cecelia Åsberg and Astrida Neimanis state in Bodies of the Now: Feminist Values in Posthuman Times –

The notion that one body might house one life, that a body is equal to a subject before the law, that bodies might ever be intelligible out of the contexts and situations that create them, or that bodies are primarily human, is disintegrating before our very eyes.

Research & development was supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Special thanks to Ugly Duck for supporting us with residency space.