Harradine, David (2015) It's The Skin You're Living In. Fevered Sleep.

Abstract

It’s the Skin You’re Living In is a multi-format film project, that explores and challenges images of climate change. Shot in a series of locations from the islands of Svalbard in the High Arctic to a kitchen in a house in London – via the beaches and headlands of Barra and Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides, the M11 motorway, a dairy farm in Bedfordshire and the outskirts of Hackney and the Olympic Park – the project suggests that climate change isn’t a matter just concerning distant landscapes and threatened animals, but is an ever present part of everyone’s daily lives.
There is a man dressed like a bear; a polar bear. Sometimes he looks like a person dressed like a bear – human, fake – and sometimes he looks like he might actually be a bear – animal, real. Over the course of a fragmented journey from the northern reaches of Europe, through Scotland, to the south of the UK, the bear-skin-costume is dismantled, revealing the man inside the animal.
It’s the Skin You’re Living in is an attempt to make images of climate change that remind us of how profoundly we’re connected to both nature and culture, how we’re all undergoing change, on a journey, searching for home. It’s language is one of broken images, repeated actions and walking, walking, walking; a strange, sad and funny meditation on being human and being animal, lost in a changing world.