Björk previewed her new ‘Cornucopia’ film at Climate Week yesterday (September 27), outlining its core environmental message.
The Icelandic music icon is the creative director of the film, which is currently in post-production, according to Deadline.
Filmed live in Lisbon, Portugal from the European leg of her ‘Cornucopia’ world tour, the movie captures Björk’s climate crisis activism.
In a statement to the publication structured in the form of a poem, the singer shared the significance of the project.
“It is an emergency, in order to survive as a species we need to define our utopia. The Paris climate accord is a modern utopia impossible to imagine, but overcoming our environmental challenges is the only way we can survive.
“We have to imagine something that doesn’t exist, carve intentionally into the future and demand space for hope, weave a matriarchal dome. Let’s imagine a world where nature and technology collaborate and make a song about ita musical mockup then move into it.
“Let’s write music for our destination, in mythologies around the world after a disaster one captures the spirit with a flute and starts anew, carved out of the first fauna, we arrive on a new island with mutant species unknown hybrids of birds and plants, our past is on loop, turn it off, let ́s be intentional about the light, imagine a future be in it.”
Further details about the film are expected to be announced by the end of this year.
Björk has been vocal about her environmental activism in the past. Last year she released a song called ‘Oral’ with Rosalia to help fight open-pen salmon farming in her native Iceland.
Having written the song between the late ’90s and early 2000s, the single stayed unpublished until she dug it up from her archives and decided to “give it to activism”.
In an interview with NME her 2022 cover, the singer spoke about the influence of nature in the sound of her album ‘Fossora’. “There’s a lot of pleasure in the album… it’s about enjoying that space. That’s why it ended up getting this kind of ‘fungus’ theme,” she said.
“And when I say ‘fungus’, I mean more like a sound. Six bass clarinets and really fat, deep notes. It is designed for the bottom-end. You need to almost be inside all that bass. It fills the whole room. That’s the grounding of being able to stay in your house.”
She added: “‘Medulla’ and ‘Fossora’ are living in the world you’ve made. The lyrics are more about living this life day-to-day and loving it.”
Reviewing the singer’s ‘Cornucopia’ show in London in 2019, NME described it as “an audacious, expectation-disrupting spectacular from an artist unbothered with people-pleasing”.
The concert also featured a specially recorded message from climate activist Greta Thunberg.