L.E.O.P.A.R.T.

In this haunting trilogy of speculative video narratives, Schönefeld excavates futuristic landscapes that are, in fact, echoes of our present ecological and political crises - turning cautionary prophecies into embodied cinematic warning signs. Schönefeld’s films unfold in futures close enough to feel imminent - visions that are not fantastical, but unsettlingly plausible. Her video series, TRILOGY OF TOMORROW (D A R K W A T E R S // S N O W F O X // L.E.O.P.A.R.T.), created between 2018 and 2019, was set in the imagined tomorrows of 2023, 2029, and 2032. Now, one of those projected futures has already become our past - transforming what was once fiction into a lived reality. In its convergence of past prediction and future condition, Schönefeld’s work is a meditation on the ways that imagined futures, and experienced pasts, inevitably loop back to define our present landscapes - political, environmental, and psychological.

L.E.O.P.A.R.T. (2019) leaps forward to 2032, where mutated crops and a monolithic seed corporation have monopolized life itself. In an insurgent narrative of human agency against engineered ecological futures, L.E.O. establishes a self sufficient camp where she leads a revolt of survivors who have refused genetic entrapment.