Hanna Rullmann (DAI's long standing communication designer together with Lauren Alexander) takes part in A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS, A CONSORTIUM OF CRABS, A CULTURE OF BACTERIA, A LABOR OF MOLES, A BUSINESS OF FERRETS, A SIEGE OF HERONS, A CONSPIRACY OF LEMURS, A WISDOM OF WOMBATS, A PANDEMONIUM OF PARROTS. Through the work of thirteen artists, collectives and advocacy groups, this exhibition looks into the possibilities of broadening the scope of inter-species relations and multispecies worlding, to underscore notions of becoming-with and response-ability. As such, it wonders what tactics we need—as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers calls it—to form an ‘ecology of practices’, in which multi-sensory embodied knowledge and care becomes part of our relationship to the multifarious and multispecies living environment again. Opening Saturday 8th March at RADIUS Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology, and continuing until 18th May 2025.
"The prioritizing of humans also leads to restrictive definitions of who counts as human, and the brutalization of animals is related to the brutalization of human animals. This will be a very important arena of struggle during the coming period." Angela Davis and Astra Taylor, ‘Angela Davis on the Struggle for Socialist Internationalism and a Real Democracy’, Jacobin (October 2020)
Capitalism turns bodies into machines, reproducing itself by coercing and commodifying the reproduction of human and non-human animals. In that, humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm, working and breeding on the market’s clock rather than their own biological one. Following political theorist Alyssa Battistoni, could we envision “the ‘work of nature’ as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.”?
Confronting this insidious and entangled trajectory requires new ways of organising our thoughts and our material relations—our ideologies, economies, and ecologies. In so thinking, this multispecies exhibition assemblage argues that it is time for a new kind of political balance of power, one that reevaluates, recomposes and even intrudes the conventional human-animal dialogic focus, to its recovery in the key of multispecies worlds—and its multitude of lively agents and entangled relations.
Participating artists: Sander Blomsma, Elsa Brès, Gabi Dao, Anka Helfertová, Marianne Hoffmeister Castro, Manjot Kaur, The Multispecies Collective, Jochen Lempert, Kris Lemsalu, Sonia Levy, nabbteeri, Thomas Pausz, Hanna Rullmann
More details via RADIUS CCA.
About Hanna Rullmann