andreas arndt - Beaver Fever

Beaver Fever, 2017, snapshot film set, Härön Island, Sweden

Beaver Fever, installation view In Watermelon Sugar, 2018, Poppositions Brussels/Vleeshal Middleburg

‘Beaver Fever’ describes a documentation film crew, led by a director, art theoretician and a social scientist, which investigates a beaver colony on a lonely island in Sweden, and categorizing their achievements between functional and dysfunctional. Whereas beavers normally focus on building dams, lodges and channels, the beavers on this very island seem to have made a further step in their transformation of their environment: constantly chewing, they have left small objects on the island, objects neither suitable for constructing dams nor lodges and as such abstract. The filmic work documents the beavers’ objects and the film crew’s search for an answer to the question, how these objects came about, as well as where the beavers being behind it, might be.

The filmic work documents the beavers’ objects and the film crew’s search for an answer to the question, how these objects came about, as well as where the beavers being behind it, might be. Soon enough, the film crew has to realise that the beavers probably have abandoned the island and hence the search turns into a quest to find the reason, why they have disappeared. Environmental changes, sunken water level, effects of the modern civilisation as the effect of the film crew on the research object, all get analysed and brought up as possible reasons and causes to the disappearing of the beavers’ and documented while the camera is on.

Roos Gortzak, Director Vleeshal, Middleburg, NL