CGI Film
Commissioned by Dimitrije Bašićević Mangelos YVAA fund.

composition/sound design/production

Voice: Djurdjica Babić
Music: Lav Kovač
Text/animation/worldbuilding and work: Sanja Anđelković

The title Human Tours is a wordplay on the title of a NYC TikToker who is also known as the Rat Daddy by the online community with his Rat tours (for just 50 dollars) around New York. Human tours is a work that not only plays on titles but its meanings within the current global rhetoric.
In the work Human tours, rats are the archivists of human (hi)story. For the longest time, there were wars against them (this is why, still, NYC has its own Rat Tzar). I believe there was something that rats mirrored that humans also have, and it is continuously triggering them- the insatiable hunger for sex, pleasure, and evolutionary success. They have spread with wars and European imperialism to colonized territories in the Americas as well as Africa and Australia. Rats thrive in the trenches of modern warfare even today. There are many things that rats knew before we took them into captivity, to serve as model organisms. This innate knowledge draws through one layer of the film, and is imagining a rat that first heard Traviata being performed in the 1856 in NYC for the first time. Some time later (2013), it was discovered that playing Traviata to rats before open heart surgeries makes for a better survival success.
The work Human tours makes seemingly inconceivable parallels between worlds/spaces and times in rats but also human history. It imagines a world where rats, with the help of their imagination (something that was a recent discovery), tell a story of the capitalist society generated into a CGI film where opera is their mode of expression and appropriation is their tool of habitation through the film. The rat song (Traviata) or rat tour is composed through the lens of the term geontopower (coined by Elizabeth Povinelli, anthropologist from NYC) by de-constructing the original text and appropriating the main musical theme. The film shows rats as messengers between worlds and times, while playing with the idea of ancestral rat knowledge.