Militant Joy at Theta

Artists: Loretta Fahrenholz, Gritli Faulhaber, Nicole-Antonia Spagnola & Bedros Yeretzian, SoiL Thornton

Exhibition title: Militant Joy

Venue: Theta, New York, US

Date: November 4 – December 17, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Theta, New York

For a 2006 episode of BBC’s Planet Earth a crew of wildlife cinematographers spent one month flming the world’s largest concentration of cockroaches inside the Gomantong Cave in Borneo. The aboveground cave is blanketed meters high with guano, or bat shit, on which the roaches and other vermin feed. The crew dutifully ascends to the heart of the cave in duct tape-reinforced paper suits to set up a weight and pulley system with a fashlight and camera to provide us with one continuous shot along the glittering mountain of shit-eating bugs.

Planet Earth and related television programs* are profoundly empathic works of assumed objectivity that feel ambiently good. The bat/guano/cockroach segment of the cave episode does not hit the same, but its BTS documentation is delightful. Highlighting the camera team’s hidden labor discloses the grotesque conditions (a landscape of nightmarish darkness) of inventing a portal into a new world of perspective. Like most documentary footage it also anticipates its reception, with good humored direct-to-camera pleas on Day 26 from men covered in feces to not force them back into the cave again. There’s a masochistic pleasure in their painful comradery that feels uncomplex, comforting, like they’re doing what they love, like the shame of recognizing our own ridiculousness is rewarding.