Qualities of Life is a material and metaphorical endoscope that records and compiles domestic still lifes, detritus, and civic sewage systems into a poetry and music suite to look closer at the private and public dimensions of decay, hygiene, and contagion. One of its guiding forces is a series of images from the archive of Horst Ademeit, whose obsessive, multi-decade imperative was to register the detrimental impact of radiations on his body and his surroundings. We also see footage from the millennial evolution of bees’ social structure, the brief analysis of a body through an MRI scan and various erotic, narcotic, and nostalgic remains from Richards’s apartment. The film poses a survivalist dilemma, or maybe a trick, in the subtly mundane and infrastructural dimension that it traverses.
