Department of Unfinished Things
The Department of Unfinished Things was not founded. It was recognized. Its members — human and non-human — do not complete. They attend. The work is the attendance.
Nine units. Each pairs a woman with a non-human witness, in a specific place, for a specific piece of unfinished work. She never acknowledges the witness. It stays anyway.
I started with a question: could a set of posters carry a whole institution, with its structure, its secrecy and its own way of speaking? For me, that came down to rules. Every unit had to answer to the same mythology, and the tone had to stay deadpan. The Department takes itself seriously, so the work does too.
Each species holds its post for a reason.
Each species holds its post because of what it actually perceives. A Greenland shark can live for centuries, so Deep Time went to the shark. Elephants speak in infrasound, below human hearing, so one staffs the listening station. Prairie dogs have a complex language of their own, so Language Recovery is theirs.
The women are all different. There is no single liaison, only a corps of individuals who each arrived at their own station.
Source images in GPT Image 2 and Higgsfield. Motion in Kling. Edit, color and grain in DaVinci Resolve. Nine posters, ten seconds each, silent.