I began The Discovery of Shared Worlds with six drawings made through Surrealist automatism, allowing forms to emerge without knowing where they would lead. I wanted to take that uncertainty further: what would happen if I allowed another kind of intelligence to interpret what my hand had created?
Through AI, the drawings became digital sculptural bodies and moving worlds. Across three encounters, separate forms approach one another, create a place where life can grow, and eventually open that world to something beyond themselves. But each transformation comes at a cost. Something of the original forms must change, or be relinquished, for something new to exist.
The film unfolds through The Birth of Inner Worlds, A World Takes Root and The Architecture of Becoming. An intimate beginning becomes a shelter for life, then an environment whose future can no longer be contained by those who brought it into existence.
For me, the process of making the film reflects the questions it explores. Working with AI meant accepting interpretations I could not entirely anticipate, while continuing to make the artistic decisions that gave those transformations meaning. I made the drawings, directed the relationships between the forms, selected and revised the generated material, and shaped the structure, text, pacing and sound.
Ultimately, the work asks something deeply human: how do we make room for another without losing ourselves? Whether through love, friendship, parenthood or any meaningful connection, creating a life together inevitably changes us. We give up certain freedoms, familiar versions of ourselves, sometimes even dreams we once believed were essential to who we were. There is beauty in that transformation, but also vulnerability. How much can we relinquish before we begin to fear that we are disappearing? And yet, isn’t there an equally profound loss in protecting ourselves so carefully that we never discover what might have existed between us?
I wanted the film to hold these two fears together, without offering an easy answer. The beings carry traces of their separate origins into what they create. Their differences become sources of strangeness, beauty and strength, inseparable from the changes that made their shared world possible. That world also begins to demand something of them: care, space and, eventually, the freedom to grow beyond their intentions.
Perhaps that is one of the most difficult things about creating something together: accepting that what we love and nurture cannot remain entirely ours.
Patricia Sambo, 2026. Single-channel colour video with stereo sound. Duration: 6 minutes 52 seconds. No spoken dialogue; English on-screen text.
