Photo: Diethild Meier / pictured: keyon gaskin and visitor
Animal Companion 2015
Performance
This performance of companionship applies principles of interspecies relations through choreography and image making in order to expand a possible repertoire of human relations. The piece proposes the exhibition space as a social art space, and as such, an arena for designing and collecting strategies for being together. Diverse registers of visuality and sensibility generate a place of public intimacy and sensitivity, proposing the practice of being together a creative one. The visitors engage artworks with and through the companionship of the performers. Language and familiar social codes are replaced with principles of touch, proximity and telepathy, co-creating empathic moments, and modes of communication that may seem otherwise inaccessible in everyday public life.
Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with—all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. In touch and regard partners willy nilly are in the miscegenous mud that infuses our bodies with all that brought contact into being. Touch and regard have consequences.
- Donna Harawary, When Species Meet | 2008