NAKED
2005-07 · 10 minutes 30 seconds · SD video, 24p
Directed, filmed, and edited by Paweł Wojtasik
Music by Sebastian Currier
Filmed in a university laboratory, Naked observes a colony of naked mole rats—blind, highly social mammals whose lives unfold through touch, vibration, proximity, and collective activity. Living in a network of transparent tubes that approximates their underground tunnels, they work, rest, play, struggle, and organize themselves around a queen. Vivid, almost surreal color and Sebastian Currier’s transformation of the laboratory’s recorded sounds place their world at the threshold between the familiar and the alien, moving the film between fascination, intimacy, and unease.
About the Film
Naked was filmed in a university laboratory where a colony of naked mole rats lived in a network of transparent plastic tubes—a rough approximation of the tunnels they dig underground in East Africa. Blind and highly sensitive to touch and vibration, the animals live collectively within a strict social order organized around a queen. They work, rest, play, hesitate, fight, and respond together to disturbances passing through the colony.
At first, I experienced them as bizarre, uncanny, and almost alien. But sustained observation gradually changed that response. Their individual temperaments, relationships, conflicts, and forms of attention became increasingly apparent. A researcher told me that he loved stopping by the laboratory because something fascinating was always happening. In time, I understood what he meant. I too became attached to the animals and could spend hours watching them, transfixed by the fullness of their lives.
The film emerges from this transformation in perception. It asks what becomes visible when attention remains with beings who initially provoke discomfort or estrangement, and how the distinction between observer and observed may begin to shift. This attention is not neutral or detached. It can include fascination, affection, identification, and absorption, while never entirely overcoming the conditions of captivity or the colony’s hierarchy and violence.
The final scene shows two animals overpowering a third. The encounter may be aggression, play, or something between the two, but the possibility of violence remains unresolved. Their social world can appear tender and cooperative, yet also crowded, authoritarian, and disturbing—qualities that make comparisons with human society difficult to avoid.
Sebastian Currier’s score reworks sounds recorded in the laboratory rather than functioning as conventional musical accompaniment. Together with the film’s vivid, almost surreal color, it heightens the strangeness of the animals’ environment, making the laboratory feel at once familiar and uncannily close to an alien world.
Writing on the Film
Scott MacDonald, “Perception as Transcendence: Interview with Paweł Wojtasik,” Film Quarterly, Winter 2011
In this extensive interview, Wojtasik discusses his experience filming naked mole rats in a university laboratory and the sympathy and identification that developed through prolonged observation. He describes the colony’s social and emotional life, the animals’ confinement within plastic tunnels, and the way the film’s intense color transformed the laboratory into a metaphor for imprisonment. The conversation places Naked within his broader inquiry into fear, perception, and the possibility of seeing beyond habitual filters.
David Wheelock, “‘Animals’ Exhibit Startles, Subverts,” Yale Daily News, February 13, 2007
Writing about Why Look at Animals? at Artspace, Wheelock considers the disturbing parallels between the mole-rat colony and human society. The article includes Wojtasik’s observation that the colony can appear like a single organism composed of many interdependent individuals.
Read the archived article (PDF)
Selected Presentations
DUMP! Multispecies Making and Unmaking, Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark, 2015
UnionDocs, Brooklyn, 2013
The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, 2009
Anthology Film Archives, New York, 2009
Kraj, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Opole, Poland, 2008
Why Look at Animals?, Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007
Images Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2007
Athens International Film and Video Festival, Athens, Ohio, 2007
San Francisco International Film Festival, 2006
Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Chicago, 2006
Antimatter Film and Video Festival, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 2006
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami Beach, Florida, 2005
Distribution
Video Data Bank
Naked is distributed by Video Data Bank and is available for screening and exhibition rental, educational purchase, institutional streaming, and archival acquisition. VDB describes the film as a portrait of a highly social colony whose overcrowding, violence, tenderness, and interdependence suggest unsettling parallels with human society.
View Paweł Wojtasik Videoworks: Volume 1
That compilation includes Dark Sun Squeeze together with several related works.
