I Hunt Nature And Culture Hunts Me

Following a residency in collaboration with the Jacana Wildlife Studios working with wolfs and wolf-dog hybrids (Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs) a performance was executed, articulated within the context of interspecies communication theories of Donna Harraway and Giorgio Agamben based on the emotional economy phenomenology explored by the author who juxtaposed her work to Joseph Beuys and Oleg Kulik. 

Following the performance a panel discussion was held with the author, Jean-Philippe Varin from Jacana Wild Life Studios as well as the wranglers and trainers of the wolves, discussing phylogenetics of the wolf, human-wolf-dog relations and animal ethics in general.

Bellow: I Hunt Nature And Culture Hunts Me / Recontres Festival / Bourges / France // 8th November 2014 (performance videodocumentation):

Performance text:

Joseph Beuys

Animals retained a natural instinct and closeness to nature that humans have lost. For me it is the idea of the word that produces all images. It is the key sign for all forms of moulding and organizing. When I speak using a theoretical language, I try to induce the impulses of this power, the power of the whole understanding of language which for me is the spiritual understanding of evolution. But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current drastically reduced understanding of language, a parallel to the reduced understanding of politics and economics. Beyond language as a verbalization lies a world of sound and impulses, a language of primary sound, without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information. Every form of life speaks a language, untapped and unheard.

Oleg Kulik

I cannot keep silence anymore! … A man is an animal first of all. And then he is a Social animal, Political animal and so on. I am an Art animal, that’s why, spectator, I need your physical and psychological efforts to make sense. There are all sorts of other knowledges outside of the center, if only one could create a new united culture of noosphere, an inclusive zoocentrist culture of the senses and of embodied perception. Everything that lives and breathes, not via words, not via aesthetics; only the moral law inside you and the necessary decision to act are required in order to hear the suppressed voice of nature, also in yourself.

Maja Smrekar

The total management of my own animality is still human, but the transcendence into a human animal is what I feel truly fulfilling. I don´t have siblings, I am alone, I am not feeling any emotional security… I want to remember when my nightmares were clearer. Until you approach submissively crawling into my bed, although I am your slave. You are my emotional crutch, my machine for loving. We compose a hybrid family, a subversive kartel. You and I are hunted by those who lack the capacity of transfer into the intimacy of companionship beyond the anthropological machine discourse of deviding species. Our relationship is a kinship. I am your little sister. When they tell me to draw my family in kindergarden, I draw you as my beloved brother. I do not erase you even though I am 5 and my first painful cultural encounter towards companion species concept disapproval starts to work, when a teacher tells me severely that a dog is not and can not ever be a part of the human family! We feel and understand each other, lying in a vast tanned skin landscape of dead animals… We dwell into the vast potential of different ways of life exploding. We implode that possibility in fear and rage, resent and animality. We smell death and feel comfortable in the uncanny valley of machined fur listening and knowing how it will end since we want to be sure of what it will cost. I want to keep you alive so there is always the possibility of murder later. I want you to understand that my malevolence is just a way to win. We want the name of our ruiner. I want you to know that being kind is overrated. I want to write my secret across your sky. I like to watch you lose control… I want your paws and teeth to scar me so I’ll know where you’ve been… We get excited when an animal is slauthered and therefore we feel sentimental. So sentimental that we can´t wait to taste it´s fear while eating it for dinner. We transcendent fear. We wanted to be there when its hot black rage ripped wide open.

We want to taste our own kind: Nature-Culture ends up being one word. We want each others controlling interest. You are my nutrient as I am yours. When I want to strangle the stars for all they promised me, I cry into you, hugging your soft fur and I want you to know my wounds are self-inflicted. I want to be somewhere beautiful when I die, with you, as you embody my intimate emotional memory. I want you to make me understand what is the difference between a child and domesticated animal? Am I a dog? I want to be your dog. I want to stop destroying you but I can’t. This is our intimacy. And I want and I want and I want … and I will always be hungry.

JACANA Wildlife Studios residency videodocumentation:

Production Bandits-Mages / Rencontres Festival and supported by CNC - centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, France. 

In collaboration with Jacana Wild Life Studios; Jean-Philippe Varin, Véronique Géault, Christophe Gaudry 

Co-produced with Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana - Department for Culture