I am stricken as I am sensing my second body and my responsibility to acknowledge the ethical implications of mine, and the world’s actions. “You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.” In a sense, species boundaries do not exist, speaking from evolutionary terms, the edges are blurred, and changes have happened slowly, over millennia. “The history of attempts to distinguish the human from other animals in other ways is not an intellectually glorious history. […] But humans continue to think of themselves as separate”. (Daisy Hildyard, “The Second Body, 2017)

The programme consists of a festival of two consecutive days, interconnected in concept. Leticia Laxon's performance "Travessia: I bequeath you my clothes, not my sketchbook" will take place in the main space, and will interact with the specificity of the site, through the use of the multiple doors available in and around the given space. This piece is linked to loss, and the clothes inherited have a cathartic component, which would allow “ [their] release and the performer”. Channelling Amerindian perspectivism, the artist is transforming the piece into a pluralistic human and non-human world, where reality is apprehended as an opposition to the western perception of nature, and where identity becomes uncertain.

The Political Animal will be hosting a reading group that aims at furthering the conversation, and deepening the understanding of Amerindian perspectivism, particularly Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 

On the second day, Valentine Comar will be hosting a round-table discussion about the permacuratorial and how art can be more sustainable, through collective thinking, and curatorial responsibility. Afterwards, Adrianna Liedtke will explore bird watching, in her performance "One For The Birds", taking visitors on a trip to the nearby ecological park. This piece will be followed by a talk about the labour of animals, and of labouring animals. 

The Political Animal group is a monthly reading group, which incorporates discussions, international exchange and exhibition opportunities for artists, writers, curators, and scientists supporting cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural examination of inter-species relationships. Olga Koroleva (MFA Slade School of Fine Art, b.1987, Russia) is an artist, filmmaker, curator, and founder of The Political Animal group. She is a London-based artist working across writing, photography, moving image and live action.

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Letícia Laxon (Brazil) graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2017 and is currently conducting her MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. She works across the disciplines of drawing, film, performance, painting and installation. The act of drawing - an investigative action that emanates from the body and returns to it - is the basis and structure from which her practice derives in a variety of media.

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Valentine Comar (postgraduate student, MA Contemporary Art Theory, Goldsmiths College) is applying the twelve principles of permaculture to the art ecosystem. The aim is to seek a theory for an artistic production/curatorial model to follow, and – if successful – an ethical and sustainable proposal to take action through the production of art projects and engagement with ecology.

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Adrianna Liedtke (Germany) graduated from Goldsmiths with an MFA in Fine Art in 2017. Her work begins with reference to the given situation: personal experience; the institutional framework of an invitation; social encounters; - shortly: the emotional, economical and ecological circumstances she finds. Social reality; the struggle within the economy of attention; the competition for the accumulation of symbolic capital; the design of social sensibility: all of these are nodes in the network-machine that needs to call itself an “I”. The vectors resulting from these forces at and in work point towards the other. If there were a moment in which ‘my self’ or the other might appear as truly different – truly other – it would interrupt the struggle, the competition and the game of seduction. Art is the place where these interruptions appear.

RSVP:

day one: https://www.facebook.com/events/2023210241261736/?active_tab=about
day two: https://www.facebook.com/events/944927972375027/?active_tab=about

Listing in Season for Change: https://www.seasonforchange.org.uk/events/i-have-nothing-but-my-body/ 

Chisenhale Studios

10 - 11 August 2018

10 August
4.30-6.30 pm
The Political Animal reading group 

7pm
Leticia Laxon, "Travessia: I bequeath you my clothes, not my sketchbook" performance


11 August
4.30-6.30pm
Permacuratorial session - roundtable discussion 

7pm
Adrianna Liedtke, "One For The Birds" performance