TEMPORALITY AND POST-HUMAN COMPLICITY INALL THAT CHANGES YOU.METAMORPHOSISFROM SCIENCE FICTION TOSPECULATIVE FABULATION

Lauren Olamina, the young protagonist of Parable of the Sower (1993), a mature novel by science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), is a visionary teenager capable of founding a new religion—centered on the idea that “God is Change”—to save an Earth devastated by climate collapse, the breakdown of social structures, systemic violence, and the loss of meaning and of future. This figure inspires Lilith, the co-protagonist of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, played by Sheila Atim.

The name Lilith recalls another of Butler’s novels—Dawn (1987), the first in the Xenogenesis Trilogy—whose protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, is a Black woman who survives nuclear war and is rescued, along with a few other humans, by an alien species. Here too we find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world, but salvation does not come from a new earthly faith, rather from an alien species, the Oankali, who offer humans survival in exchange for genetic contamination: the future will be hybrid, or it will not be at all.

In Julien’s film, the figures of Lauren and Lilith Iyapo merge and are rewritten in a speculative and poetic key. In a burning world, salvation depends on the ability of every being to adapt, to care, to transform. Julien’s Lilith, in particular, seems to embody the ambivalence of metamorphosis: it is adaptation, but also loss; it is survival, but at the cost of transforming identity, species, and gender. “I cannot remember how it was in the innocence of the world, before contamination…,” Lilith says at the opening, evoking that nostalgia for a rigidly defined “human” that Butler’s novels so often challenged. Innocence is a construction, a fiction. Every origin is already hybrid.

Imago, the final chapter of Butler’s trilogy, tells the story of Jodahs, a shapeshifting hybrid able to heal through touch. Jodahs is the quintessential metamorphic creature, “neither male nor female, neither human nor alien.” This speculative trajectory on the possible evolutionary reality of the human species irradiates Julien’s entire new work, in which metamorphosis presents itself as a beyond: beyond gender, beyond species, beyond linear temporality. As Naomi, Lilith’s white alter ego, says in one of the central passages: “We are not in control, even of ourselves. Everything is in flux, including our ability to survive, maybe the task is to become capable of response.”

Played by Gwendoline Christie, the character of Naomi is loosely inspired by the figure of Mary, the scientist and interstellar traveller who is the protagonist of Naomi Mitchison’s novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). If Lilith is a post-human voice of wisdom, heir to contamination and shared survival, Naomi emerges in the dialogue as a more earthly and meditative entity. Hers is the perspective of the human who has experienced the pain of loss, the disorientation of inheritance, and who confronts time as a continuous and unstable flow.

Naomi is not a heroic traveller but a witness sensitive to change: she observes, records, feels. Her journey through space-time is above all an interior journey, made of learning, listening, and transformation through contact with the otherness. The reference to Mitchison is crucial because it brings to Julien’s work a feminist, empathetic, relational voice, in which science is not domination or control, but care, responsibility, shared language.

In Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Mary communicates with extraterrestrial beings through empathy and respect. Mitchison imagines a world in which the frontiers of the self are not boundaries to defend, but porous territories to be crossed. The characters of Lilith and Naomi seem to embody this legacy: in them we recognize the desire to learn from living beings, to become capable of response, to inhabit time as shared responsibility.

Naomi carries within herself the memory of her late mother, also a scientist—an absence that shapes her awareness. She is a descendant, a daughter of exploration and memory. While Lilith seems to come from an already hybrid future, Naomi is still in the making: she moves among the fragments of history to weave together an ethics of metamorphosis. In her dialogue with Lilith, she embodies the tension between what has been and what is becoming, between the melancholy of loss and the clarity of one who recognizes change as the only constant of the living.

“Each moment brings a metamorphosis,” Naomi states, and in this phrase her vision is concentrated: not catastrophe, but flow. Like Mitchison’s scientist, she is a permeable, porous consciousness, traversing space-time not to dominate it but to understand it, in vulnerability and empathy.

STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE

The dialogue between Lilith and Naomi suggests that there is no longer time to wait for transcendent salvations or restorations of a lost past. With Butler and Mitchison, Julien suggests that survival is built in the present, through risk, in the negotiation with the other. As in Butler’s Parable, it is also a prophetic, visionary act: imagining another community, another possible world. Where identity is fluid, relation is central, and metamorphosis is the only form of salvation. As Donna Haraway (1944) would say, it is a matter of co-existence, of “becoming-with.”

Haraway’s presence at the opening of the film marks a fundamental theoretical and imaginative threshold. Her voice inaugurates All That Changes You with a reflection that is both a statement of intent and an interpretive map: “Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a 13th-century French verb meaning to stir up, to make cloudy, to disturb.” Her words open a space in which metamorphosis is not only thematic or aesthetic, but an epistemological practice and an ethical stance. Reading passages from Staying with the Trouble (2016), Haraway invites us to remain in the troubled present, renouncing both the seduction of a salvific future and the nostalgia for a lost past. It is an exhortation to live in the midst, in the murky, in the unfinished.

The choice to foreground Haraway at the start of the film, even before the appearance of the two protagonists Lilith and Naomi, is not only a homage but an anchoring: it is the living genealogy of a thought that has revolutionized the way we imagine the relationship between species, bodies, technologies, and narratives. It is no coincidence that Octavia Butler is also one of Haraway’s main sources of inspiration; she cites Butler as a key figure in her idea of “speculative fabulation”: a theoretical narrative that does not build closed systems but imagines transformative possibilities in times of crisis.

Since the publication of the Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway has challenged the fundamental dichotomies of classical Western thought—human/non-human, nature/culture, male/female, organic/machinic—proposing instead a hybrid, interconnected, situated vision. Her thought moves like a rhizome, crossing evolutionary biology, computer science, feminist philosophy, science and science fiction, in a continuous tension between critical analysis and speculative imagination. Haraway does not propose solutions, but ways to stay, to learn to respond in situated, embodied, responsive ways.

In the film, her lesson unfolds as an ethics of multispecies coexistence. The words “mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” resonate as a poetic refrain that threads through all the subsequent sequences. Naomi and Lilith are its heirs: one in empathetic and transformative learning, the other in the wisdom of hybridity and trauma. But it is Haraway who opens the passage: not a goddess, not a guide, but a companion in thought, inhabiting with clarity and irony the complexities of the present.

Her position is also profoundly political: Staying with the Trouble is a fierce critique of the logic of salvation, purification, and linear progress. Instead of imagining a perfect future, Haraway invites us to weave relationships in the present, to build improbable kinships, to think of survival as a collective practice of care and transformation. Her thought has profoundly influenced not only contemporary theory but also visual arts, architecture, ecology, opening up new spaces of imagination and responsibility.

If Donna Haraway is the framework that shapes the speculative structure of Julien’s film, the dialogue between Lilith and Naomi opens onto a wider constellation of thought: that revolving around the “Santa Cruz School,” a theoretical and critical crossroads where some of the most radical reflections of contemporary posthumanism have taken shape. This intellectual horizon is not a unitary paradigm but an ecosystem of ideas, nourished by central figures such as Anna Tsing, Karen Barad, and Carla Freccero. It is no accident that Isaac Julien and Mark Nash, co-authors of the script of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis together with Vladimir Seput, both teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz: the theoretical universe that emerges from their work is rooted in the same network of relations, affinities, and speculative practices that characterize this academic and creative environment.

In Anna Tsing’s work, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), the possibility of surviving in a world devastated by capitalism takes the form of multispecies assemblages: stories of precarious coexistence, where ruin becomes a space for collaboration and adaptation. Like Lilith, Tsing speaks of a contaminated world, where the future is built with what remains. Karen Barad, with the notion of intra-action, breaks down the boundaries between subjects and objects, affirming that all reality emerges from material and conceptual relations in continuous transformation (see Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 2007). Carla Freccero, in turn, has articulated a reflection on memory, species, and identity that destabilizes linear narratives of time and subject. In her queer and posthuman readings, survival takes on a spectral form, becoming an ethical call to recognize what persists, even if marginal, animal-like, dispersed (see Queer/Early/Modern, Duke University Press, 2006).

Julien’s film activates a network of concepts, affects, and theoretical alliances. The metamorphoses intertwined in the film—biological, cognitive, political—are acts of shared survival, speculative forms of care and imagination born in the very heart of that situated genealogy that has found in Santa Cruz one of its most fertile expressions.

NARRATING SPACES

In All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, the architecture is not a mere scenographic backdrop but a true symbolic and dramaturgical agent. Each environment traversed by the protagonists possesses its own temporal, affective, and sensory identity, contributing to the construction of a worldview in which architecture participates in metamorphosis. The settings function as sensitive bodies, bearers of memory and possibility, and their crossing marks a continuous transition between states of being.

Palazzo Te, in particular, presents itself as a true co-protagonist of the work, on par with Lilith and Naomi who inhabit it—somewhat like Lilith Iyapo’s organic spaceship in Butler’s novel. It is an active, dialoguing presence that embodies and amplifies the theme of metamorphosis. Built between 1525 and 1535 by Giulio Romano, pupil and collaborator of Raphael, the suburban villa was commissioned by Federico II Gonzaga as a place of aesthetic experimentation. Its very design defies the rules of Renaissance classicism: perspectival games, proportional distortions, frescoes laden with ambiguity and mythological allusions make the palace an exercise in destabilizing visual and symbolic norms. It is within this eccentrically Mannerist space that Julien situates some of the film’s most intense sequences.

The fulcrum of the visual narrative is the celebrated Sala dei Giganti (Hall of the Giants), a circular room whose walls and ceiling are entirely frescoed with the apocalyptic depiction of the fall of the Titans, struck down by Jupiter’s fury. The illusionistic “all-over painting” technique draws the viewer into a dizzying spiral of destruction and metamorphosis: bodies deform, spaces collapse, perspectival scales dissolve. Julien captures this visual energy and reinterprets it as a metaphor for the collapse of classical humanism and of contemporary society. From here, from the center of crisis, departs the spaceship that will carry our travellers into another, more fluid space and time. Palazzo Te thus embodies both the sense of crisis and the possibility of renewal.

The other rooms of the palace also contribute to the semantic fabric of the film. In the Camera di Psiche, which sequentially narrates Ovid’s fable of Cupid and Psyche, the theme of transformation through love and pain is recalled in the choreography of bodies. In the Sala dei Cavalli, by contrast, the monumental depictions of steeds are destabilized by the protagonists’ sinuous movement. These spaces, originally conceived to glorify a masculine, military, and hierarchical vision of power, are re-inhabited by Julien with posthuman female bodies, who dismantle the dominant iconography and resemanticise its visual apparatus.

All that Changes You awakens the latent memory of Palazzo Te, activating its symbolic potential and putting it into dialogue with a fragmented and mutable present. Giulio Romano, architect and painter of distortion and excess, is interpreted by Julien as a forerunner of the speculative vision that runs through the film. Architecture thus becomes a space of aesthetic-philosophical alliance, where contemporary narration can germinate upon historically charged ground, giving shape to a new visual genealogy of metamorphosis.

Other architectural spaces, alongside Palazzo Te, contribute to the semantic script of Julien’s film, reverberating within the broader discourse on metamorphosis through diverse forms and languages. Charles Jencks’s (1939–2019) Cosmic House in London, for instance—a postmodern temple of architectural allegory—opens onto the possibility of irony, contamination among different cultural codes, the distortion of meanings, and symbolic disorientation. By contrast, Richard Found’s (1966) private residence in the Cotswolds is a glass capsule that gestures toward a futuristic dimension of change, where metamorphosis becomes transparency and suspension. In this permeable architecture, immersed in the English countryside, Lilith and Naomi seem to oscillate in a liquid temporality. Glass becomes a sensory membrane, a perceptual threshold between inside and outside, between human and non-human.

Conversely, the Herzog & de Meuron pavilion, built for the Kramlich Collection, represents a convergence of temporalities, a device that interrogates the relationship between image and body, between projection and matter. In this pavilion, the protagonists no longer walk through space but move within the time of the image, traversing sequences, apparitions, and dissolutions.

A fifth location is added to these entirely architectural spaces: the Apollo capsule, designed by Timothy Oulton, first landed in the heart of a redwood forest—near Santa Cruz—and later, at the film’s close, in the center of the Sala dei Giganti at Palazzo Te. Cloned at the scale of the historic Apollo 11 spacecraft and clad in polished steel, this hybrid structure—between fetish-object and sophisticated lounge—creates a disquieting short circuit: a hyper-artificial object, reflective and closed in on itself, embedded in an ecosystem as monumental as it is fragile. Thus presented, the capsule no longer evokes the epic of space conquest but transforms into an inner chamber, an existential threshold, a place where human subjectivity confronts its own ecological dissonance.

In All That Changes You, every space is therefore a narrating body. Julien constructs a path that does not follow linear logic, but a temporal choreography in which the places themselves transform (or transform those who pass through them). The protagonists are no longer simply characters, but mobile sensors of a world in mutation, reflecting itself in buildings, forests, and devices.