Private Project

It Is Hard to Leave Sense Unmade

IT IS HARD TO LEAVE SENSE UNMADE is a journey through the rewilding of two ecosystems - the Swiss Alps and the filmmaker's intestines. Using only machine-made images, the film asks questions about state and bodily borders, wildness and health, sensory and mediated knowing, and where belonging fits in.

  • Miriam Simun
    Director
    Contact Zone Level 1, Your Urge to Breathe is a Lie, Interspecies Robot Sex, Making Human Cheese, A Wet Chemical Trace, Imagine Lines and Alibis, What is Known is Not Necessarily a Fact
  • Miriam Simun
    Writer
    Contact Zone Level 1, Your Urge to Breathe is a Lie, Interspecies Robot Sex, Making Human Cheese, A Wet Chemical Trace, Imagine Lines and Alibis, What is Known is Not Necessarily a Fact
  • Elijah Stevens
    Producer
    Fire of Love, Hollywoodgate, King Coal
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Feature
  • Genres:
    Essay Film, Documentary, Experimental
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 20 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    January 1, 2026
  • Production Budget:
    620,010 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    Austria, Mexico, Switzerland, United States
  • Language:
    English, French, Spanish
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Miriam Simun

Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent and humor to create art works in various formats, for example - video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. Recurring questions revolve around interspecies relations and non-human intelligence; the relationship of technological innovation to mythology and desire; the construction of knowledge and the violence of categories; and radical reimaginings of life under ecological crisis.

Trained as a sociologist, Simun takes on the role of ‘artist-as-fieldworker,’ conducting first-person research with diverse places and communities: from scientific laboratories to rewilded forests, from freedivers to human pollinators. This in-depth and corporeal research dictates the form of the final artworks.

Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including the New Museum (NYC, 2024), Gropius Bau (Berlin, 2020), Momenta Biennale (Montreal, 2021), New Museum (New York, 2017), Himalayas Museum (Shanghai, 2017), MIT List Center for Visual Art (Cambridge, 2022) and the Bogota Museum of Modern Art (Colombia, 2019). Simun is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Creative Capital Foundation grant, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant, Onassis Foundation fellowship, and Gulbenkian Foundation International Artist grant, among others. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, Forbes, Flash Art International, Art21 and ARTNews, Simun's works are included in private collections and in the public collection of FRAC-Bretagne.

Simun holds degrees from the MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction group), NYU's ITP Program, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently an artist-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a fellow at Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio.

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Director Statement

I am an artist and filmmaker working for over ten years at the intersection of climate crisis and species extinction; interspecies relations and human politics; new technologies and narratives of progress. By investigating the collision of human, non-human, and technological bodies, my work seeks to offer radical reimaginings of our entangled existence under ecological crisis. If collision can be understood to be a form of disturbance (in the ecological sense), then in disturbance we find not only damage, but also the opportunity for renewal. As we collide in new and ancient ways, we (a multi-species we) discover the permeability of boundaries (epidermal, geographic, political) - and find an increasing urgency to renew our conditions of being together.
My work continuously aims to situate ecological stories within their socio-political contexts, and ask how scientific knowledge can work with ancient, traditional, embodied and sensorial ways of knowing and acting upon the earth. IT IS HARD TO LEAVE SENSE UNMADE is a film about rewilding forests and human guts as much as it is about the construction of knowledge - ways of making sense of data and experience. The project examines how meditating technologies are being deployed for scientific knowing, while introducing audiences to both ancient and somatic “ways of knowing” interior and exterior landscapes.

I have made six short films - on topics of human exceptionalism, endangered plants, cephalopods, and human adaptation to sea level rise. IT IS HARD TO LEAVE SENSE UNMADE is the final chapter of SURVIVAL TRILOGY. Chapter I - the short film Imagined Lines and Alibis, explores the relationship of hunting wild animals, animal conservation, and gun regulations in the American Southwest. Chapter II - Interspecies Robot Sex, explored human response to the disappearance of the bees - both in China where humans do the work of pollinators, and at Harvard where swarms of AI-drone “Robobees” are being developed for artificial pollination.

As my first feature film, this project is an exciting development of my practice. I am seeking creative and professional support in this evolution, particularly as this project is more “narrative” and story-driven than my previous projects. I also want to seek support and exposure around film financing, as this is new terrain for me, as most previous financing has come from the art world.

Success as an artist for me means creating work that transforms defeatist narratives around environmental crises, offering possibility and hope through shifting audiences’ relations - to themselves, to other beings, and to the planet.