Ritual of Rejoin

The project creates a speculative spirituality of an oceanic posthuman. The future mythology rebuilds the past, the ritual transforms breaths to waves, dissolving selves into the water.

The experimental short film Ritual of Rejoin is a part of the artist Buket Yenidoğan's ongoing worldbuilding project, "The Ones Who Became the Ocean", where she explores the spiritual practice and belief system of a speculative society which lives on the edge of the global flood.

Ritual of Rejoin depicts a group of women performing a ritual of this society to re-immigrate to the ocean. An unexpected attendee of the ritual starts the turn of events that changes the path of humanity towards a cetaceanic dream as the narrator reveals their identity in a meditative poem. Every myth has survived through narrative poems and this form follows the tradition to carry this speculative cultural structure from an alternative timeline. While the future mythology rebuilds the past, the ritual transforms breaths to waves, dissolving selves into the water.

The visual language offers a familiar yet far away, ancient but futuristic feeling, the form and rhythm aims to open a window to subconscious states of the mind to pursue transformation in the audience.

“Ocean was the mother as the mother was the ocean
That gestates bodies of water,
That gestates life beyond terrestrial,
That gestates change,
That gestates futures.
A generation to be born in the ocean,
A re-immigration.
Womb to tomb, the tidal return of the human stream. “

Screened in Boat Live Works London (2021), IKLECTIK London UK (2022), Gordon Theater
Royal College of Art (2022), KunstZEUGHaus Rapperswill (2021) and KAMMGARN WEST
Schaffhausen (2022) in Switzerland.