Verena Paravel is an anthropologist, artist and filmmaker who works in the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, based in Cambridge, USA, at Harvard University, and in Paris, France. Paravel collaborates with Lucien Castaing-Taylor in film, video, sound, photography, and installation. Their works together include Leviathan, Still Life/ Nature Morte, somniloquies, Commensal, and Caniba. Paravel’s work is in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and has been exhibited at the Tate, the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, and elsewhere. Her award-winning films and videos have been exhibited at Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, Venice and various other film festivals.
In the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.…