In 1967, a young biologist re-wrote the history of life. “We are compound individuals,” declared Lynn Margulis, arguing that a multiplicity of life-forms performed vital functions inside human cells. Margulis gave a name to this co-sharing event of various microorganisms – endosymbiosis – which in Erin Espelie’s loose translation from Mandarin (内共生) becomes “inside the shared life.”

Expanding the principles of collaboration and symbiosis on Earth to motherhood and thinking about mitochondria – “ancestral symbionts that live on within us and pass matrilineally” – Espelie also acknowledges the cinematic tradition that portrays the human body as an untraversed landscape and the planetary horizon, as pictured in the iconic photograph, Earthrise, from 1968. Thinking of “the planetary“, Lynn Margulis also played a central role in the articulation of the Gaia theory, which was co-developed with James Lovelock. The theory of the “Symbiotic Earth” asserts that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth forming a synergistic and self-regulating system that helps maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. Paying tribute to Margulis’ ground-breaking vision that placed collaboration in the centre of the evolution and life (instead of “survival of the fittest”) and demolished the idea that human is human (90% of human cells are non-human; bacterial, fungal, viral or animal) or for that matter ‘an individual’ being at all, Erin Espelie enmeshes ghostly audio from the scientist’s radical ideas with sounds of various and strange oceanic creatures.