LUMA Arles is pleased to present Delta, a major new film commission by artist and filmmaker Verena Paravel, developed as part of her wider research project, Cosmofonia. Filmed in the unique ecosystem of the Rhône river delta, the work explores the fragile and often invisible lives of the many species that inhabit the wetlands of the Camargue.
In Delta, Paravel approaches the landscape as a dense field of relationships, where human and nonhuman lives are intertwined. Through innovative camera techniques and experimental sound recording, she creates an immersive sensory experience that shifts perception away from human centrality, attuning viewers to other rhythms, other agencies, and other forms of presence. The film reveals a world in which boundaries between species, bodies, and environments are porous, and where life and death unfold as part of continuous processes of transformation.
Paravel’s approach challenges conventional hierarchies of perception, proposing film as a tool to encounter other modes of being. Image and sound operate as instruments of attention, revealing the delta as a space where multiple temporalities and life cycles coexist.
Delta extends Paravel’s radical exploration of cinema as a means to encounter a plural world, a world composed of many voices, and many ways of inhabiting the earth. Paravel asserts film as a medium of contact, advancing a body of work that is fundamentally altering the sensorial and conceptual terrain of contemporary practices.
