Seen From Here, I Feel Like Belonging

From Leon Emonds-Pool and Emilia Auhagen-Kuoppamäki, 30’, 2025

To open the day, we present the film Seen from Here, I Feel Like Belonging, selected from the films submitted for this first edition of Unarchive Complexity. The film puts biodiversity — a key theme of the event — in the spotlight, as well as those who, yesterday and today, study it, document it, and work to preserve it.

June 1971 — in a shifting landscape, entirely situated below sea level, a young biology student dies during his final year of study, leaving behind an unfinished scientific collection. More than fifty years later, a group of ecologists and volunteers seek to understand and document this same environment as it exists today.

Authors’ notes:

Seen from Here, I Feel Like Belonging explores a geographical region that we deliberately leave unnamed, but whose landscape unmistakably bears the imprint of the powerful forces of nature and time — a landscape transformed over the decades to meet the needs of human beings.

While researching local archives, we discovered the collection of a young biology student, Lieven Braber, who had documented the environmental transformations of his native region during the 1960s. Following his untimely death, his unfinished work was donated to the archives by his mother. This collection became the starting point for Seen From Here, I Feel Like Belonging.

Not long afterwards, we immersed ourselves in a network of ecologists and volunteers, all driven by questions similar to those Lieven had once asked — but now confronted with a profoundly transformed environment. Their work, too, will one day become part of the region’s ever-growing archives. And their work, too, remains largely invisible to the public.

We went into the field with our protagonists to sketch a snapshot of the present. A fleeting image of a landscape emblematic of so many other territories now undergoing profound transformations.

It is impossible to know what History will make of their work. What our film nevertheless seeks to capture is their attentiveness, determination, and their sense of belonging to a time and a place that they, in turn, allow us to draw closer to.