Wellspring (2025)
04:09 min
Directed, Filmed, Edited, Written and Narrated — Lee Pivnik
Animation Sequences - Mark Zamlinsky, Frances Love
Sound design - Patricio Con Todo
Writting commissioned for Queer Ecologies Research Collective - “A Glossary for Queer Ecologies”
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture | Issue 64: Queering Nature | Summer 2024
Video commissioned for City of Miami Beach - No Vacancy program, The Shelborne Hotel, Miami Art Week 2025
I’m trying to be more tidal. To embrace change. It’s a thought I have as I curl up, marooned at the bottom of this tide pool.
The water is calm, and as I move it through the siphon on my mantle I realize my breath has synced with the waves.
Shattering my breathwork, a shadow darkens the water and a hand plunges in! I spot a blob of sargassum and frantically become it, painting its color and texture onto my skin.
The hand reaches for me and I jet away, throwing myself over the edge of the tide pool and running up the shoreline.
I try to balance as my suction cups hit the asphalt and contort into clumsy feet.
I feel my eight limbs merge into four and split into digits at the ends.
My head has deflated, and my mouth slides up my face.
I realize I am fully nude and I alter my pigmentation again to give the illusion of a shirt and pants.
Nothing crazy: a gray vintage tee and jeans.
I pass a woman on the sidewalk and (eager to try out these limbs) I use both arms to wave at her.
She shoots me a look of primal fear, as if I’m threatening, or horrible.
I get the feeling she sees through my disguise, but isn’t seeing me.
In her eyes, I’m like The Thing, infecting crew members on an Antarctic research station, hunting and becoming them at once.
I wonder when humans and my species split. In a strange, timeless memory, I see two aquatic flatworms crawling along the Proterozoic shore.
As the tide went out, one dove deep in the cool waters; the other remained near the rocky shallows, eventually coming out terrestrial.
I look backwards at the woman who scorned me and I become her.
I take her form but not her anger, and the next person I pass greets me with a smile.
I am getting good at giving human. I will continue to mimic, to learn slowly and closely, before I reveal my true form, which is formlessness made flesh.
A cephalopodic code switch, I will walk among people until I can teach them the beauty of mutation, and trust that they’ll listen.