Limerence

Limerence

“Limerence” is an experimental film based on a long-term performance, in which the artist’s body is covered with burdock burrs—spiked seed pods that cling aggressively to passersby. Shot with a handheld, early-2000s digital aesthetic, the camera tracks a figure whose status remains unclear: human, vegetal, or a hybrid. The film does not follow a linear narrative, unfolding instead as an oneiric, body-horror B-movie in which the protagonist appears at once doubled and alone, either a conflictual couple or a single organism. The body loses its boundaries, dissolving into the surrounding landscape or, inversely, emerging from it. Borrowing the term “limerence” from popular psychology—an obsessive attachment to a person one can never reach—it articulates a sense of melancholy and impossibility vis-à-vis the natural world, amplified by a soundtrack by harpist Ange Halliwell. The film thus exposes both longing for and withdrawal from “wild” nature as a distinctly human fiction and projection.

Andrey Shental | RU

Andrey Shental is a Berlin-based artist and writer working across film, landscape performance, environmental interventions, critical and speculative texts. Informed by his background in philosophy and a fascination with sublime natural forces, his practice explores cross-species communication, the domination of nature, and ideological biases embedded in techno-scientific systems. Through queer-ecological performative works, he uses his own body to stage relations of attachment, submission, and dissolution, challenging pastoral and patriarchal imaginaries of the environment. In his films, Shental grants political agency to more-than-human actors, questioning anthropocentric hierarchies and entangling natural and social histories.