L'Ombra di Rasputin

A hunter, a veterinarian and a nurse conversing around a surgical table while performing surgery on a wild boar. Another wound is being stitched up, but this time it occurs in a liminal condition that manifests itself at the intersection between different visions of care. A wild life rescue and a hunter juxtapose in one ecology where nature is manufactured, harvested and exploited by human capital. In this frame the wild boar Rasputin is held captive in between imperatives of ecological human regulations; stolen from the woods as a piglet by curious hands and later taken care of by a local wild life rescue centre, now Rasputin is considered too beasty to join domestic environments and too affected by human contact to be released in the woods. Whereas the nature/culture divide is enacted, wilderness is the shadow of human architectures. This film is a sensorial exploration that looks at conservation behaviours as infrastructures shielding domestic spheres from wildlife in the plains surrounding Piacenza, one territory amongst the many heavily transformed by industrial agriculture. Soundscapes of these troubled lands are framed in conversations with humans, other-than-human actants and technologies of control.