Carolina Caycedo
Reciprocal Sacrifice (2022)
Single-channel digital video
12 mins 40 secs
Screened 8-31 October 2025
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Caycedo’s film, Reciprocal Sacrifice, takes viewers on the journey of a salmon seeking to return to its spawning grounds in the Sawtooth Mountains. The salmon narrates the challenges it faces as it swims upstream and tells of the heating of the water in the lakes, creeks and rivers in the Snake River Basin. With a voiceover by Thomas “Tatlo” Gregory of the Nez Perce Tribe, viewers learn of the salmon’s generosity in sustaining people and ecosystems over generations. Caycedo writes, “this performative generosity is at the core of regional indigenous survival, their 20th-century fight for fishing rights and self-governance [...]. The film looks to highlight the cosmological story concerning self-sacrifice, generosity, love and gratitude enjoining us to care for salmon-human relations and inviting humans to take the turn to self-sacrifice in order to save the salmon relative.”Commissioned by the Sun Valley Museum of Art
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Film still from Reciprocal Sacrifice (2022) by Carolina Caycedo -
Tessel Janse
In response to Reciprocal Sacrifice by Carolina CaycedoSalmon, being of two worlds.
Of salty ocean and fresh mountain stream,
You hold multiplicity in your breath.
And you remind me,
That my voice is like a river.
A flowing stream braiding entangled patterns,
Host to more than just myself.
But, like Snake River,
When reduced to a resource,
Speech becomes dammed.
Its twists and turns fixed,
Into currents starved of oxygen and nutrients.
An infected body slowly heating,
Swelling into stagnant lakes,
Submerging riverbeds and floodplains that once sustained life.
Speech becomes a reservoir to be mined for power,
Breathing, withdrawn.
Salmon, being of memory,
Stubbornly, you return,
And challenge me to do the same.
To honour the pact between ancestors both human and more-than-human.
How do I allow my voice to once again grow enmeshed in its surroundings?
How do I remember, like the fish remember their origin?
To respond is, first, to listen.
To hear the salmon speak,
Not through voice but through the ecosystem’s aliveness.
Through the health of trees,
Of elk, bear, people.
Through generous bodies ready for renewal,
Returning each year,
Calling a meeting and expecting our attendance.
Like after centuries of erasure,
The people of the Snake River Basin remember.
When after more than a hundred years,
The dams come down,
The salmon will remember.
Breach the dams,
And let the river speak!
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Portrait of Carolina Caycedo by Robin Sean Grattan
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Interspecies Entanglements
Interspecies Entanglements is a programme of films made by contemporary artists, that interrogate the tensions and possibilities of the human-animal relationship from a range of different perspectives and cultural contexts. The programme foregrounds how artists are working to reimagine more ethical relations with nonhuman animals through interdisciplinary modes of practice. With a focus on expanded performance methodologies, it positions artistic practice as a meaningful site through which to enact more affirmative animal relations. From an intersectional and inclusive perspective, the programme aims to address how animal oppression overlaps with other forms of contemporary oppression in capitalist-colonial contexts. These complex entanglements are elaborated by scholars and artists invited to enter into dialogue with the films through newly commissioned texts.This programme is curated by Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp and kindly supported by the Culture and Animals Foundation.
