Patricia MacCormack: Hybridity: The concept of interstitial hybridity informs the film. The interviewee states that merpeople are at the limit, neither land nor sea, neither fish nor human, and aligns that with the apprehension of being female (presumably in phallocentric culture). This kind of ambiguity is at the core of posthuman becomings. It raises ambiguities with other binaries, such as the natural and the cultural, the seductive and destructive, myth and reality, and even the parasite (humans) and host (oceans).
How are these ambiguities and others critical to larger questions of ways to navigate de-anthropocentrism? 

Suzanne Husky: My sense is that merfolk hybrids hold a powerful yearn for belonging, a form of quest to merge with the element of water and ultimately to earth. I would say that yes, they help us consider the worlds of water and their plants, fish, mammal and bird beings. I find the question difficult because of the complexity of the hybrid. One of my first thoughts were on Ovid’s metamorphoses and hybrids; folks turning into trees, pigs, half horse, half bull, half snake half bird. Ovid’s metamorphoses were perceived as a threat by the roman empire who wanted to hold the illusion of its own immutability. Accordingly, we might think hybridity is challenging to dominant culture. But the last husband of my grandmother lived with a pig heart, my child is half Korean american, my gut collaborates with zillions of microorganisms, all the plants I’m surrounded by are hybrid, and on and on and on. Everything, everyone is hybrid.

In agroecology—the world I dedicate most my time to—there is a clear understanding that the places of junction of different worlds, like for example shores of bodies of water, hedges, margins between meadow and forest, the bottom of a cliff, the canopy of a tree, a whole in the ground—are the places where complex diversity can emerge. Those are places of traffic and where worlds meet, eat, exchange, multiply, mix, mycorhize, remediate, regenerate and hybridize. Water and air also flow and condensate differently around those places, adding complexity. Seeds get carried by beings across borders, above and underground, changing the future landscape and soilscapes.

One of the major challenges of the future is to transform agriculture and reintroduce field margins, preserve old knowledgeable trees, plant trees from seed (and not grafts) so new species can emerge. Wild hybridity is absolutely vital as new species will have learned to cope with new weather patterns. Human-made hybrids created for monoculture compete for food, for sun. for space. In agroecology. they say that “the difference between the desert and the forest is not water, it human.” The idea is to co-create a tangled interspecies world, and not to fight against it. We know how to revitalise soils, feed the worms and arthropods, and work in alliance. The same way pigeons or fox create gardens, termites and ants grow mushrooms and ferment stuff, or the same way beavers dam rivers and help them flood, or squirrels plants acorn and chestnut trees, maybe more proactively to overcome the massive damage, revitalising soils and seeding wild seeds.

PMC: The occupation of the gaze: Beyond (or perhaps in spite of) the interstitiality of merpeople, there is a clear division of the feminine and masculine aesthetic of these particular merpeople. The make-up tutorials for women are most often beauty make-ups, with the exception of the eco-damage make-ups and lover-longing barnacles. The men in make-up have a more monstrous look, as does the ‘toxic waste’ mermaid, with fangs etc. The main interviewee occupies a strange liminal space between traditional caged (or tanked) go-go girl, blowing kisses, well-toned, smiling and performatively feminine, and trapped animals, as one may see fish in restaurants. But there is also something volitionally freakshow and proudly uncanny about the performance, and she is well above the punters. Mermaids still cover their breasts (except the one vegan protester interestingly) while mermen seem to need not worry about their nipples, so the textual reading of the bodies is both traditional and foiled by a tail. The interspersing of the medieval peephole woodcuts of mermaids is similarly fascinating and oscillates power both of the gaze and reading the flesh.
What happens to the gaze in these hybrid relational spectacles/participations?

SH: In melusinian myths, the gaze is central. Medusa is the most famous gaze-striking snake goddess. A common structure of water creatures stories is the following: there is a wedding between a supernatural being (met next to a fountain) and a mortal. The mortal has to agree to a certain rule. When the rule is broken and the supernatural hybridity is revealed, all the blessing they had brought to their partner disappears. Most of the time, the rule has something to do with the gaze: the partner can’t look at his wife on Saturdays, or when she bathes, when she gives birth, or at night (water creatures are largely female, but also man-woman [Salmacis], and male [Triton]). The gaze kills the deal. The non-gaze is the deal. And when the rule is broken, the gazer sees a shark giving birth (Japan) a merserpent bathing (Melusine) and then the creature disappears. For ever. Mercreatures offer a glimpse of the other world, the divine or magic world, the world forbidden to humans. They come from the world of water, where they influence telluric forces, cause terrestrial, maritime and cosmic phenomena.

In Dive bar, Sacramento, California, “No one can see a mermaid put their tail on or off.” Some gazes are still forbidden. The metamorphosis remains off limit. But maybe there is a lesson to be learned in the age where disappearing is nearly impossible. The way Dive bar merfolks were perceived and the way they lived their work was very different. Merfolks are apnee experts, swimmers, athletes. They can’t see outside the aquarium and work with the assumption of benevolence. On the other side, alcohol takes over bodies unceremoniously. Strangely Dive bar is very close to California’s state capitol and the governor’s office, and the bar’s customers mostly work for the government (keeping in tradition! Early medieval European nobles had false genealogies written about themselves linking them to a supernatural ancestor, ideally a mermaid!). Most California professional mermaids work for the film industry or wealthy kid birthday parties, strangely keeping an ancestral myth alive in rectangular swimming pools.

As the creator of a new peephole from which one can observe certain contemporary merfolks, I’m grateful for the perseverance of this ancestral myth. To me, the way it survives holds all the ambiguities it did historically. It’s crafty, clumsy and graceful.

PMC: Subjectivity: Merpeople, even while gendered waist up, are genital-less or genital-free. What does this do to gender? Further they are (in this film) mostly able-bodied (with the exception of the swimming woman who leaves her prosthetic legs by the pool), making themselves disabled as the protester stuck on the bridge testifies. Is this crip fetishism, or empathic, or something otherwise in terms of altering the appropriate and inappropriate spaces for the Vitruvian body? The gender ambiguity and lack of genitals means there is an insinuation of queerness, be it asexuality, or mer-drag at least. Yet the interviewee is hyper hetnorm as a femme mermaid with a pirate boyfriend, while the mermen seemed performatively campy and simultaneously masculine. How does the mer-community play with what we think about performative gender and what that means without and beyond signifying genitals? Finally, how does the mer-community inform therian culture? Where do therian mer-people fit in this community, in terms of aesthetics and in its relation with identification of self?

SH: Aristote had noticed that the eel did not reproduce like other fish; no one had ever seen a uterus, or egg sac or sperm on them. They seemed to appear spontaneously in dry ponds after the first rains, making them children of mud and water. That belief was held on through the middle ages and merfolks often have serpent tails. Eels are also a hybrid of fish and snake. This misunderstood sexuality gave that animal an unusual status and it was associated with the live-giving pagan mergodess. In the Lambton worm folktale, the giant killer worm who lives in a well had seven holes on both his sides, like an eel. It was also believed that the eel's vital force was not in its head but in its tail. Hildegard von Bingen mentions the flesh of eel to be as impure as pig. According to Étienne de Bourbon, the bishop of Lausanne excommunicated all the eels of the Leman lake in the 13th century. Eel is also a being that can develop friendship with humans and come when you call it, making it different from other fish apparently. Eel’s grease was rubbed on the eyes to improve sight, to help gazing, to help see the other world (according to medievalist Philippe Walter in his 2008 book La Fée Mélusine: Le serpent et l'oiseau [The Melusine Fairy: the serpent and the bird]). Water monsters in general hold the mystery of origin, they belong to a pre-human world. (In the genesis too, the serpent is still the one that has inside info on the divine world and trees of knowledge).

All the children of Melusine have the monstrosity of their mother: Urien has giant ears, Eudes has an ear larger than the other, Guy has an eye that is higher than the other, Antoine has a lion paw on his left cheek, Renaud has just one really good eye, Geoffroy has a tooth like a boar, Fromont has a patch of mole hair on his nose, Horrible is a giant with 3 eyes. (Horrible is so ferocious he eats all his nannies, so Melusine has him killed). But there are no crips, all have unique powers, and a semi-divinity status.

PMC: Ecosophy: There seems a tension between performative aesthetic identity and direct action activism in the examples here, a sense of belonging and dis/belonging (to anthropocentrism, to ‘civilised land’, to industry and capitalism). Mercommunities are known for their eco-activism as a form of peaceful protest, seen in the peta and lush ads in the film, in the beach clean ups. Performative seduction, especially by mermaids, can function as a kind of modern day siren song, but listening leads to shared ethical interest, which is a form of the destruction of the anthropocentric Odysseus of capitalism and industry (why the images of the sinking ships are forms of joy as much as detriment in the film—joy for the loss of profit, detriment to the ocean). However, digital cultural awareness perpetuates the eco-tourism that continues to use rather than leave be marine wildlife. Photos with sharks, whales and turtles are examples of a visual creation of kin without the nonhumans’ consent and invading nonhuman space not to clean up but to force alliance. What kinds of alternate forms of siren seduction can film catalyse to lead us into nonhuman and ahuman becomings that invite activism for an ecosophical activism?

SH: While researching for this film I noticed contemporary historians were shifting the way they were understanding the large paintings of ships caught in massive storms (of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century). Not only were the depictions of the oceanic sublime, or sailor heroism, technology prowess or empire but also—as you mention—the fantasy of trade and capitalism failure. Europe was changing rapidly, cities were growing, enclosure accelerated, social disparities increased, alien plants arrived, merchandise and tales coming from distant shores, resentment came with changes and it all came from those ships. Nowadays, those sinkings are sometimes intentional ways of disposing waste, and probably as toxic as the zillion gallons of detergent poured into oceans daily.

One of the oldest living organisms on earth is a seagrass (Posidonia) living off the coast of Ibiza, it’s 100 000 years old, and it won’t survive the sunscreen used by tourists. Sunscreen. 

Film: In my first permaculture classes with Earth Activist Training, Starhawk shared this idea: “If you start by telling people that they are the problem, you’re not going to get very far, but if you tell them they are the solution, then you have an army of earth activists.” Our artistic duo the Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture (which highlights extractivist ideology of the French ministry of agriculture but also establishes living soils and plants trees) recently made a film, Manifeste pour une agriculture de l’amour (Manifesto for an agriculture of love, 2020). We asked a very unusual agronomist mycologist to create an agricultural political program, and his program spans over 1000 years. It's one hour and a half long, spans over 1000 years and goes from cultivating rain to sacred trees, the politics of cabins, migratory birds, phosphorus cycles, free rivers and marches and all of it while also cultivating a lot of love. The particularity of the mycologist is his life goals to work with land, grow in love. He is deeply spiritual, did a vote of poverty, plants thousands of trees every year, always welcoming the foreign plants and the foreigners as teachers of the knowledge we will need for climate resilience.