Gallery Entry

BOKITO WAS HERE

By Neural Fiction · NL

BOKITO WAS HERE. Never, except always. Beyond the Bars of Existence Life and death aren’t beginnings or endings. They are words we use to cage our consciousness, much like time itself. In 2007, Bokito, a silverback gorilla at Rotterdam’s Blijdorp Zoo, escaped his enclosure and attacked a woman, leaving her seriously injured. Despite the violence of the incident, Bokito became a national legend. His name entered the Dutch language, his story became part of popular culture, and he grew into one of the Netherlands’ most iconic animals. The striking contrast between the severity of his actions and the fascination he inspired reveals how readily we turn a living being into a symbol, projecting our own fears, humour and fantasies onto it. When Bokito died on 4 April 2023, aged 27, the news made headlines. Yet the living being behind the legend received little lasting reflection in death. BOKITO is my tribute to his legend, carrying his story beyond celebrity and folklore into a meditation on existence itself. The film follows a circular visual metamorphosis in which a physical being becomes a timeless symbol, moving beyond the boundaries between body and spirit, confinement and freedom, life and death. The bars of the enclosure become metaphors for the limits through which we attempt to contain consciousness. A tender visual grief-trip unfolds in which saying goodbye feels more like a delayed birth. Commissioned by theatre group Rauwe Vitrage, in collaboration with PC Art Paviljoen and Museum Tot Zover, Amsterdam, the film was conceived as a visual artwork about death. It was presented at an exhibition on death in a funeral centre situated on the grounds of a cemetery. More than a year after the exhibition, my father died in accordance with his own wishes. He had been my model of strength, a primal, almost elemental presence in my life. Knowing that he wanted to die, and that his death reflected his own wishes, strengthened my ability to find peace with his passing. It helped me understand death not simply as the definitive loss of someone, but as part of a larger continuity that exceeds our human understanding of beginnings and endings. This personal experience brought the film into an entirely new light. What I had created as an artistic exploration of mortality became something I could inhabit myself. Its circular transformation acquired an intimate meaning I could not have fully anticipated when making it. The film seemed to be reborn through my experience of loss, its images connecting Bokito’s transformation, my father’s death and my own growing sense of acceptance. Art and life converged in a holistic synergy, revealing a poetic core that had been present all along. Created in 2025 with early-stage generative AI, the film was produced locally on a consumer PC using open-source tools and rights-free source material. Rather than following a conventional CGI pipeline of constructing and animating explicit 3D worlds, I worked through prompt engineering, experimentation, selection and iterative refinement, directing unpredictable generations towards a coherent visual language. The limitations of this emerging technology became part of the creative challenge. My authorship lies in the concept, the visual direction and the decisions that bind the images into an emotional and philosophical whole. The technology could generate imagery; it could not independently determine why Bokito’s legend, the mortality of a living being and my own evolving understanding of loss belonged together. BOKITO explores whether technology capable of generating almost anything can be guided towards something that truly matters. It is both a tribute to a cultural legend and a personal meditation on transformation, memory and acceptance. Ultimately, the film returns to its opening thought: perhaps life and death are not opposing ends at all, but words we use to describe a transformation whose true nature remains beyond our grasp.

Category

VIDEO

Approved

12 October 2026