Plants as Trans Ecologies: Artifice and Deformation in Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys (2017)

This essay explores how artifice and queer form in Bertrand Mandico’s film The Wild Boys (2017. Dir. Bertrand Mandico. Ecce Films) interrogate more-than-human entanglements to orient viewers toward a trans ecology. In Mandico’s botanical imaginary, he crafts a world of excessive artifice where both the characters and the land in which they inhabit are entirely mutable. By creating a polymorphously perverse world where there is no such thing as a hermetically sealed body, Mandico uses plants to explore the possibilities of transness and how it may provide a focus for epistemological positions, knowledge, and orientations toward a post-anthropocentric future.