Corridor 8 interview

I:

Where are you from? UK and Iceland

Where did you study? In Sunderland and Glasgow School of Art

When and why did you begin to collaborate? We collaborated occasionally at first, beginning in 1999, but our collaborative practice as such began a couple of years later. Prior to this our individual practices were ideologically and conceptually aligned in many ways. We both had a prevailing interest in cultural perceptions and configurations of landscape and how issues of identity are bound up in such constructions. Whilst we were on a residency in Greenland we realized that we were discussing ideas and work so closely that it seemed a natural thing to pool our resources and skills both practically and conceptually.

Where are you now? And why? We are based in Cumbria in the north of England, in Gothenburg in Sweden and in Reykjavík, Iceland. We take inspiration from travelling and moving between spaces but it is in the Cumbria that we have our studio. There we have lots of space to work and think and we are able to live from day to day with our subject which stems from the interface between human and non-human animals.

II:

Who has influenced you?Fluxus and the Situationists – at art school? John Latham’s notion that context is half the work – in general? Socially and politically engaged art

If you were to name one artist, whose work do you most admire? Joseph Beuys

Which is your favourite work of art? I love America and America Loves me“

Which museum/cultural institution would you like to visit regularly? American Museum of Natural History,

III:

How do you work? Many of our projects are long term affairs sometimes developing over years. We do like to mix our activity up though from time to time with some works that are conceived and completed within a few months. There’s a big research component in what we do, often requiring us to immerse ourselves in unfamiliar environments in pursuit of the specific knowledge and experience of others. We accumulate information in this way, together with photography and video material, discussing it as we gather it and it is revealed to us. We use drawing to test out ideas and alternative configurations of potential components.

What is it you want to achieve? Through the work and the discourse that accrues around it and its context we’d like people to begin to think differently about human behaviour, the history of our behaviour and its consequences now and for the future.

How does the collaboration function? It functions as a focus for collective thought. It functions as a prompt to enact ideas of indeterminate authorship. It is a pooling of trust. It works as a vehicle in which ideas are road tested, approved, discarded, refined in order that something of worth survives and has a public visibility. (There’s no roadkill in that analogy). It functions as a well-spring of methods by which surprising things can be revealed and made to happen. It is hard work, often involving close attention to detail but most rewardingly, it references and is rooted in the experience of people who care about what they’re talking about.

How do ideas develop between you? How do you decide? Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. We use drawing to visualize our ideas for each other. We make maquettes and collections of things… We often have to write about what we’re up to even during the developmental stages of the work and we actually find that very useful in helping to crystallize and give clarity to the ideas – what’s looking promising and what’s really going nowhere.

How do you share tasks? We bounce things between us. Things need to be done all the time in order to maintain the momentum of the project especially since we are working with others and their schedules and so it just depends on which of us is available at any given time. It may be that for a particular project Mark will do more of the interviews or Bryndís the lion’s share of the camera shoot but we both prefer to be present and to determine collectively by what we find, how things should be. A caricature would be that Bryndís is very thorough on planning, trying to anticipate everything in advance – Mark is comfortable with responding to the opportunities provided by specific conditions on the ground, but in reality both recognize the significance of the invaluable relationship between planning and informed reflexivity. 

What are you working on currently? This summer we are completing a three year project entitled Uncertainty in the City commissioned in 2007 by the Storey Gallery in Lancaster UK. It explores the responses of people to the presence of other species in and around their homes. We’ve been working with people who actively encourage the proximity of certain animals and others who have anxieties and fear, regarding any such presence as alien, undesirable, abhorrent. We’ve spent a lot of time with the Pest Control Department in the local area, with agents who are called in to act as intermediaries in situations which are clearly profoundly distressing sometimes for people. So it’s a lot about how we see ourselves in relation to environment and the lengths to which we’ll go in order to isolate and insulate ourselves from or conversely, to draw close to living things which are like but not like us. Uncertainty rules but look where intolerance has got us. There’s a forthcoming publication (The Green Box, Berlin) documenting the whole project including Radio Animal www.radioanimal.org and that book will be launched late in 2010 or early 2011.

What are your plans for the future? We have a couple of other projects in the pipeline. The photographic archive from nanoq: flat out and bluesome is still travelling in the UK and Scandinavia. We have been asked to take part in an exhibition curated by Yvette Watt for the Ten Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania 2011 together with Mark Dion and Marcus Coates; then there is a group show of contemporary Cumbrian Artists in Tullie House, Carlisle. Research wise we’ve just been north to Svalbard doing some preliminary research on the dens of polar bears – but that’s all to come.

Snæbjörnsottir/Wilson June 2010

The Empty Wilderness: Seals and Animal Representation

Introduction: the eclipsed animal

In the discipline of Fine Art upon which this essay draws, landscape has traditionally been seen as an aesthetic subject in which, natural scenery is represented in order to reflect literally or metaphorically, a range of human needs. As a concept, nature is thought to encapsulate the elements of the natural world sometimes including non human-animals but excluding human-animals. Landscape on the other hand is something that is cultivated by man but occupied by all living beings including human and non-human animals. Simon Schama (1995) has proposed wilderness, which is often understood as an area of uncultivated land devoid of humans but occupied by other natural elements including some non-human animals, to be a construction of the human mind. In a post humanist discourse animals, being part of our environment, constructed and non-constructed, shape and occupy our physical and psychological landscapes. An understanding of this ‘functionality of landscape’ and its instrumentalization is key to the inclusion in this text of references to non-human animals and our historical and contemporary interaction with them. All are embodiments of the continuous and non-objectified landscape – that is, the landscape from which we have hitherto and traditionally detached ourselves in order to support and sustain a steadfastly anthropocentric view.

In certain locations on the coastline, boulders become seals, grunting and groaning before sliding into the sea. It is not only the shape of the seal that references its environment so closely, but also the colour of its skin. Historically, for seafaring nations, the seal provided a valuable subsistence for human beings. Tellingly, as with many human-animal relations, this relationship is made visible through traces of the actual animal’s ‘death’ which heralds the beginning of a ‘cultured’ relationship evidenced in its role as food, clothing or as some representation in anthropocentric form. ‘Death’ refers in this case both to an actual physical death and also the death that occurs through obfuscation, where the living animal is overlaid by whatever metaphorical or symbolic purpose is ascribed to it. When investigating human and animal relations, one of the most significant factors of the research on which this paper relies has been the revelation of the cultural obliteration and cancellation of the ‘death’ of the animal. Our observations have revealed how subsequent reconstructions become [mis]representative not only of entire species but implicitly of a notional, continuous and endless life. Akira Lippit (2000)has written an extensive account of how animal death is reflected within metaphysics, in the history of philosophy and literature. His exploration reveals not only how the animal disappears through representation, but also how humans as beings monopolize the act of dying. According to Lippit, animals don’t die they ‘disappear’ thus removing for us humans, the ethical problem of colonizing and consuming their bodies.

 In addition to the above, this paper draws on the results of extensive research, which underpins a cluster of art projects conducted by the authors (as the collaborative art practice of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson) between 2002 and 2009. The main emphasis is on the work entitled between you and me (2009), the research focus of which is seal–human relations around the coasts of Iceland. In our practice we engage in long-term relational and socially engaged projects. By ‘relational’ we are referring not only to the form but also to the objective in the work: that of reaching across species with a view to encouraging in the audience a cognitive awareness of ‘parallel lives’ or what Donna Haraway refers to as ‘concatenated worlds’ (Gane, 2006, 145). We seek to approach and attempt temporarily to occupy or invoke the space of the ‘other’ – in this instance the animal or animals we are working with – in order in turn to enable what may be a revelatory view of our human selves as ‘other’. Using a variety of media, our work takes the form of installations through which the process of the work’s making is made visible. This is achieved by means of presenting objects and/or documents that in the context of an exhibition lead the audience to the experience of alternative perspectives, allowing a temporary disruption and shift in their thinking. In this and in other recent projects, one of the mechanisms enabling us as artists to address this issue has been to single out ‘individual’ animals as opposed to a notional, idealized animal and to make these individuals (and our cultural relationship with them and others like them), the specific subject of our scrutiny. In order to conduct our enquiry, we propose through our artwork to identify different spaces of encounter in which an animal ‘eradication’ can be seen to occur and either directly or by implication suggest, an alternative, non-eradicative approach.

 The context of the research                                                            

Amongst the numerous reasons for us choosing Iceland in order to explore human-seal relationships, the cyclical change in the commodity value of the seal was central. We talked to people who, within their lifetimes, have regarded and experienced the seal in many different guises: as a valuable catch for subsistence; as government-declared vermin; as a source of bounty because of its alleged role in the lifecycle of a worm that infects cod; and as an object of tourist attention and as a living being with intrinsic value. In contemporary Iceland there are still people who engage in the killing of seal pups for their meat and skin, although these are fewer now due to the failing commercial sealskin and seal meat markets. There are also people who would happily hunt seals only for the sake of a kill, or on the grounds that it has been designated a pest. This notion of the seal as pest was in fact, reinforced by government policy in the 1970s and 80s, when a bounty was put on its head (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009). Although this law no longer stands, those engaged in salmon fishing still see the seal as a competitor and will thus expediently, endeavour to sustain the myth. In contrast, there are also those who want to protect the seal, as they detect through annual increases in tourism, its potential, in respect of livelihood and income from the animal’s visible role as a large, living, charismatic mammal within its own natural habitat.

During the period of our research we were particularly interested in those people who on a daily basis, are engaged in the life and death of seals – both in the stewardship and the killing of the animals. Consequently, we travelled to a number of locations and interviewed several individuals on camera. The farm Húsey in Northeast Iceland, one of the key places that we visited, is notable for its historical association with seals, which for a long time have been the main resource for subsistence of the people living there. Breeding in the estuary of a large river, the seal cows give birth to the pups on the sand flats where the river divides.When we first visited the place in 2007, numerous seal pups had just been killed inadvertently when large volumes of water were released from the dam at Kárahnjúkar, a new and environmentally controversial hydro-electric power project, thereby causing the river to flood. In the ensuing deluge the young pups were separated from their mothers and drowned. The water had been released without prior warning or consultation with those whose livelihood has for centuries depended on working and living with the natural resources in this area (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009).

On our arrival at Húsey for the filming of the preparation for the 2008 seal hunt, we were introduced to Silli, a young seal pup that had been found abandoned on the seashore. The farmer, Örn Þorleifsson had been informed of its presence by tourists staying at the youth hostel at Húsey. He told us that abandoned pups in the wild are subject to a cruel fate; skuas and gulls will attack, typically unravelling and pecking their umbilical cord and plucking out their eyes. The care these pups need to survive without their mothers is substantial, as they must be fed every four hours with a specially made mixture to match the mother’s milk. The feeding was done either by Örn Þorleifsson or his wife. The procedure was that approximately 20 cm of soft plastic tube attached to a plastic bottle was pushed down Silli’s throat and the milk mixture pumped into his stomach. Afterwards he would be patted and cuddled to help him burp. During the day Silli would be around the place, often in close proximity to humans, but in the evening he would be lifted into the back of an old Land Rover where he had a bed made out of newspapers. At the time of our visit, Silli was approximately five weeks old and it was expected he would stay at the farm until 12–15 weeks old, or until mid-to-late August, when he would be taken to the seashore close to where he was found and allowed to go free. In the interim between our visit and him being released, there would still be a lot of care involved in looking after him. There is a transitional process necessary to take him from fluids to solid food (herring and/or capelin) and involving his learning to catch fish by himself. All these tasks were overseen by Örn Þorleifsson, who even puts on his waders to accompany the seal when he is first introduced to swimming in the local pond.

Silli happened to be male, and once free, should he survive the winter, would be likely to come back to this area year after year. Had the pup been female, she would return to give birth to pups that might well be caught in the nets laid by the farmer at Húsey the following year. This shift from caring to killing calls to mind a statement made by Donna Haraway. She proposes the concept of ‘killing well’, in an attempt to find a model of harmony, responsibility and coherence within omnivore culture and in human/non human animal relations:

“Human beings must learn to kill responsibly. And to be killed responsibly, yearning for the capacity to respond and to recognize response, always with reasons but knowing there will never be sufficient reason… I do not think we can nurture living until we get better at facing killing” (Haraway, 2008, 81).

Another pivotal interview was with Knútur Óskarsson at the farm Ósar, in Northwest Iceland. Óskarsson, the youngest in his family and the only family member (apart from his mother) to remain on the farm runs a small non-profitable business which includes farming a small number of cows and running a youth hostel situated in the old farmhouse. The tourist attraction for the youth hostel is mainly connected to wild life and an old seal colony, which is on sand flats in the estuary and partly belonging to Ósar. The work and words of this young farmer brought theory and practice together substantiating to some extent Haraway’s comments above. Amongst other things he told us:

I think there is a demand for really interesting places with nature. I think people are really actually quickly discovering something that is a unique – unique nature and in this consuming world we live in, what do people do? They come and consume nature. It is just if you buy yourself a trip to Iceland it is like consuming something…

I am farming this place and what happens is that from time to time we have sick animals that wash up and then again this is not my land on the other side. I own the land on this side but not on the other side but what happens is that baby seals sometimes wash up on my side and if they are sick or dying then I sometimes have to put them out of their misery or kill them if you can say so. If you have a sick animal dying you don’t let it die there because we have seagulls that come and pluck their eyes out while the seal is still alive so I go and put it out of its misery that is what I do but then again I have to be careful because not to go too close because if they want to protect themselves they are quick, much quicker than a human and quick to bite (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009).

The interview provided us with the audio content for a video work, which is one component of the exhibition between you and me. A slow motion sequence filmed from land, showing a seal swimming up and down an estuary, is overlaid with the voice of Knútur. As she swims, the seal occasionally looks towards the camera, the focus of which oscillates between her head and a low boundary of wild heather bushes, privileging alternately the distinct territories of land and water.

The art and resonance

Over two years we observed and recorded a variety of ‘seal encounters’. For the most part these were more or less candid – some became documentary in nature, many were anecdotal, but a key component in the project became the organization and filming of the mounting of a seal’s skin by a Reykjavík taxidermist. The result, entitled the naming of things, was exhibited as a large-screen video projection as part of the exhibition and installation between you and me (2009). Our intention for this work was to place the proposed audience as much as possible in the space in which the real seal’s skin is being collapsed into a representation of ‘complete sealness’. The idea behind the making of the work was to extend the period of this transformation and have the audience linger amongst the remains and the ‘act of reconstruction’ – between the ruins of the real and the empty promise of the surrogate.

The process began with us having to locate a dead seal. Because we do not sanction the killing of animals for our art, this was not easy. Initially we had contacted a farmer in the North-West of Iceland where much of the research was conducted, whom we’d heard had three dead seals awaiting taxidermy in his freezer. A seal colony is located on his land and his plan is to create a small tourist information centre with stuffed seal specimens as an attraction, supplementary to the possibility of observing live seals there in their natural environment. In the end, with the schedules of the farmer and the taxidermist being at odds, it proved too difficult for us to co-ordinate our trip to the north of Iceland for the purpose of filming. So after various attempts to locate a dead seal in three different countries, namely Sweden, Britain and Iceland, a call finally came from Húsey, notifying us of a seal that had drowned in the farm’s fishing nets.

Örn Þorleifsson, the farmer in Húsey, agreed to freeze the seal for us and keep it until a taxidermist was identified who could do the job. When we did find someone willing to work with us, the frozen seal was sent as frozen meat cargo to Reykjavík. We then travelled to Reykjavík to receive the seal and to bring it to the taxidermist. The first process of the job was to defrost the seal and a couple of days later it was skinned – something we were present for, but chose not to film. We did however take some photographs for the purposes of documentation. The decision not to film the process of skinning was made on the basis that we did not want to sensationalize the dead body through visceral depictions of meat and blood. What we wished to instigate was a challenge to representation itself, by rooting its construction within the familiar and by reapplying methodologies that were, in accordance with contemporary taste – on the face of it at least, ‘palatable’ and non-confrontational. In order to begin to unravel the phenomenon with which most urban dwellers in Western culture are familiar – the sanitized, clinical, human death, a death normally neither seen nor imagined – we focused on the process of transformation where a sanitized, dead body is moulded into a representation of itself. The process of stuffing the seal took just over three hours, although a polystyrene mould had been prepared prior to this. This form was a very basic shape, using measurements taken from the dead seal body. The skin, having already been treated, was wrapped and then stitched up around the polystyrene ‘body’. The claws on the flippers remained when the skin was removed, but metal wire rods were pushed into the front and back flippers to enable positional adjustments of these to be made. Clay was put into the flippers and face for further shaping. Glass eyes were inserted, but the whiskers and nose were those of the seal. Before the seal was skinned we’d produced a rough indication of what kind of posture we required. We had studied the footage of seals taken during our research and we wanted our seal to be on its stomach and slightly to one side looking both confident and alert. For the filming we had two cameras and studio lighting, which brought stark lucidity to the setting of the taxidermist’s workshop. In accordance with our approach generally, we did not otherwise attempt to change or manipulate the environment. The filming was in close up, focusing tightly on the ‘animal’ and the hands of the taxidermist.

In the editing suite it became evident that the complete film itself, despite the tight framing, was too close to being simply an exhaustive documentation of the activity of taxidermy. So we decided instead to focus on selected sequences in which the meeting between the human skin (the hands of the taxidermist) and the animal skin was fore-grounded and where any sense of a beginning and an ending was suppressed. When slowing this footage down, the emphasis in the work changed, from showing the purposeful, methodical act of a craftsman, to a kind of protracted dance or a ‘wrestling’ between the two. What the work begins to suggest is an ‘animation’ in the direct sense of ‘instilling life’, although significantly in the film this remains strategically and problematically an unfulfilled ambition. Through the process of slowing the film, the sound was drawn out and lowered in pitch, an effect which further enhanced this sense of struggle. In this contest between human and animal skin, the dead seal is made subject to an expression of power and control and becomes subordinate to the act of its own re-creation.

An associative way of thinking about a lens-based document that tracks the transformation from the ‘real’ to the ‘unreal’ is to consider the linear process of ‘death’ and subsequent resurrection, which is central to the Christian narrative. Amongst the different orders of Christianity, perspectives differ regarding the body and its representation in relation to the sacrifice and resurrection, with Catholics for example, believing the wine and the bread to ‘be’ the blood and the body of Christ where Lutherans/Protestants consider it only to be ‘symbolic’ of the same. However, according to historical, sacred depictions, the ‘dead body’ has a quality of agency that through a form of transcendence in which light often plays a crucial role, allows for its occasional re-emergence as an image. This effect is encountered most remarkably in the shroud of Turin, a Christian ‘relic’, the authenticity of which has been exhaustively contested but which from any perspective (whether it be of miraculous transmission or photographic prototype) constitutes a phenomenon of image-transferral (Pickenett, 2006).

This association is compounded when considering the materiality of the tools applied in the process of making the naming of things,i.e. light, glass, body. And although a photograph is arguably an object in itself, in the process of its making through light, a presence is recorded, the nature of which still considered by most official institutions to be a reliable, authentic representation, for example in passport photographs, driving licences, police records and CCTV, Judith Halberstam has pointed out that in the contemporary films Over the Hedge, Finding Nemo and Bee Story, the human and non-human characters are featured as “animated and unanimated rather than real and constructed or subjects and objects” (Halberstam, 2007) and by switching the ‘norm’ around so that humans are read as ‘constructed’ and the animals read as ‘real’, our relationship to animals is reworked. So by seeing ourselves as being ‘human’ in a way that is truly novel to us, new possibilities of reappraisal and change in our relations with others are elicited.

In an earlier art project, again involving taxidermy, (nanoq: flat out and bluesome, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2006), which used stuffed polar bears to explore issues of animal representation, we came to realize that the more obvious imperfections in some of the ‘older’ polar bear specimens revealed something uniquely aberrant and yet oddly eloquent, a subtext to the main theme of species-representation and perhaps most acutely, the possibility for the beholder of imagining a life-having-been-lived. In contrast, the newer and more ‘perfectly’ reproduced taxidermy specimens seem to be poorer in this subtle but telling respect. The artist Peter Friedl (2007) orchestrated this phenomenon to a striking effect in his appropriation and exhibition of a stuffed giraffe exhibited in Documenta 2007.

“…Until 2002, Brownie was a favorite among visitors to Kalkilya zoo in the West Bank. She died when the small town became the center of a military offensive and Israeli troops attacked a Hamas camp. Brownie panicked, ran into an iron rod, then fell to the floor and died of heart failure…” (DW-WORLD.DE, 2007)

After the accident, her body was stuffed by a local veterinarian, with no training in taxidermy. The result gives her the appearance of an enormous and much abused soft toy rather than that of a giraffe. At the same time, by a strange inversion triggered perhaps by a manifest indignity we are made more aware of the individual animal that has lived and died than of some other function that taxidermised animals are normally supposed to perform. Such observations led us to take seriously problems inherent in the act of representation itself, those qualities that representation must disallow and the lies therefore that representation must tell – the more polished and ‘believable’ the representation, the better and more deceptive, the lie…

Empathy and notions of weakness

It is all too tempting to find prime causality for our conscious separation from nature in the thinking of the Enlightenment. Whilst Christianity must also accept its role in the laying of foundations and subsequent cementing of a relationship summed up in terms of human dominion over animals, the practices of scientists from the mid 17th Century onwards illustrate starkly and disturbingly how such dominion came to be exercised in the spirit of this thinking.

In the 17th century, the scientist Robert Boyle carried out an experiment on a skylark using a vacuum chamber or air pump, a glass chamber from which air was removed through a brass tube using a valve to control the flow (Boyle, 1660). The idea was to observe and interpret the movements of the creature in its final struggle for breath before the collapse of its lungs. These experiments by Boyle and his contemporaries and successors in the field of natural science were deemed necessary to prove the crucial importance of breath to life. In the experiment mentioned above, Boyle described in detail the last moments of the bird’s life, how ‘she began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with [ ] violent and irregular convulsions… the bird threw her self over and over two or three times, and died with her breast upward, her head downwards, and her neck awry (Donald, 2007, 6).’

The human detachment implicit in the execution of such experiments is clear. In the science of the Enlightenment we even expect it, but in another of our interviews we have detected parallels of detachment and dispassionate clarity within a more contemporary, rural account. In this interview, the farmer and seal hunter Jóhannes Gíslason from Skáleyjar, one of many islands in the bay of Breiðafjörður in West Iceland, describes the hunting of seals in the 1950s and 60s. In his contemplation of animal death, presented as a component of the work between you and me,he proposes quite seriously that a seal ‘doesn’t mind drowning’. He says:

Nets were used to catch the seal pups and it was considered good if you caught a pup alive; it was then cut and made to bleed. Most was already bloody meat as most of the pups drown in the nets; this is considered terrible by environmentalists as people don’t like the idea of drowning but the seal doesn’t mind drowning. If you shoot a seal the seal colony will flee, but no seal cow will run away when her own seal pup is drowned, even by her side. It doesn’t upset nature to catch seal pups in nets, as is the custom. It’s just humans that think they deserve better than to be drowned but the seal is not afraid, he lives and dies in the sea; for him this is a natural way of dying (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009).

One hundred years after Boyle’s air pump experiments, the English landscape and portrait painter Joseph Wright painted Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), an image documenting different registers of empathy and detachment in the depiction of the faces of those present during the death of what has been identified as a cockatoo. Diana Donald (2007) draws attention to the respective hierarchical status of animals when she proposes that by choosing to depict as the subject of this experiment an animal identified as a pet rather than for example, “a sparrow or a rat” an attempt was made to highlight moral dilemmas by simultaneously framing a milestone in the process of scientific experimentation and a milestone in consciousness awareness of human nature – that is of sympathy and/or empathy (Donald, 2007, 6). James Ferguson FRS, a Scottish astronomer who is thought to have been an associate of Wright, recorded that for the purposes of many such demonstrations, an animal substitute in the form of a “lungs-glass” with a small air-filled bladder came to be used, because otherwise the experiment was “…too shocking to every spectator who has the least degree of humanity”(Rupke, 1987, 30).

The seal and its ways have long exercised the human imagination. The history of human relationships with the species is documented in folklore and songs, often recounting a mythic transformation [by the shedding of skin] from non-human animal to human. It is a conceit that uses the relationship between land and sea creatures as a means of reconciling these two worlds. Hayden Lorimer (2008) draws attention to certain ethologists (Lorenz, Fraser Darling, Lockley) who considered human empathy with large mammals to be rooted in facial expressions and the ability to identify with these and use them to interpret changing moods in the respective animals. For Lorenz, seals were especially significant in this regard for their facial expression and ability to ‘shed tears’, whilst others considered the darkness in the large circular eyes of seals as suggestive of emotional depth and that it was this that fostered human affinity. The role of eyes and mouth, have long been recognized as important factors in representations of the memory of human faces.

In our interview with Jóhannes Gíslason (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009), we were keen to find out how a hunter of seal pups regarded these facial affinities. Although he was aware of the ‘cuteness’ of the prey, it seemed not to interfere with his desire to capture and kill it. We had already observed how the farmer at Húsey was able to nurture and care for the same ‘wild’ animal species that he later killed and ate. Gíslason was brought up with seal being the staple in a subsistence diet and local farm families depended on it. From an early age he had been given seal flippers and faces to chew on. Indeed it was the favourite food of children on these islands. The flippers and the face were first singed, the face cut in half lengthwise, then the parts were boiled and stored in whey, resulting in the bones and cartilage becoming soft and easy to bite into.

The face has been given much significance in animal discourse. It is after all the face and the name assigned to an individual that affords him/her/it an identity and in relation to animals, it is mostly those pets and/or animals that have become assimilated within popular culture that are assigned the status of an individual through the process of naming. Traditionally, farm animals in Iceland are also given names though it must be said this form of individuation is not solely dependent on face recognition. In 2001, the organisation PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) published an image on one of their posters with the heading “Did your food have a face?” The image, not of a face but of the carcass of a face, symbolizes the ‘missing’ face of the animal in the meat industry. Although the campaign is several years old and promotes vegetarianism, it still strikes a chord today. The artist Damien Hirst’s work, A Thousand Years (1990), involves a cow head carcass similar to the one depicted in the PETA campaign. A rotting cow’s head is placed on the floor in one side of a partitioned glass vitrine, the other side containing live maggots. The flies hatch and fly through a small hole in the partition to feed on the carcass. The section that has the carcass head also has an ultraviolet device that kills many of the flies. The work draws attention to the cycle of life and death, simplifying the many indeterminable factors involved in this equation. This work could be said to animalize human attitudes to life and death, whereas the image on the PETA poster attempts to humanize the animal as a call for the humane treatment of animals. Una Chaudhuri (2007) argues that Damien Hirst’s work belongs to a posthumanist programme of re-substantialization, or what the philosopher John Gray calls “removing the mask from our animal faces”(Chaudhuri, 2007, 15).

In popular culture, celebrity chefs have been busy putting the face back on the animal in an attempt to reconnect us with the simple idea that the neatly packaged, disembodied meat on the shelves of the supermarkets is in fact from a living being with the right to a decent life before ending up on our plates. The philosopher Levinas (1906-1995) declared that non-human animals were faceless and could therefore not demand or expect an ethical response (Wolfe, 2003). Although this may seem to be borne out in the example of the seal face-as-food above, one wonders if Levinas’ position is perhaps only relevant when viewed in the context of specific cultures or circumstances and that such a position requires a kind of emotional and rational blinding in order to be genuinely sustainable. Levinas’ study on the ethical face of the animal was based on the dog Bobby, whom he and his fellow prisoners befriended in a German concentration camp. In respect of the Holocaust in particular, it should be noted that the question is often asked as to whether the ethics of animal rights can be taken seriously at all in the context of extreme human rights abuses of this nature. The eating of animal faces as food is only acceptable by most meat eaters in the West, as a part of other cultures or traditions. Christianity defines humanity by acknowledging the unique presence of a soul. In the writings of Descartes and central to ideas of the Enlightenment, the difference between men and animals was considered to be absolute – where animals were likened to machines and a boundary was drawn signifying the soul’s perceived respective presence and absence (Lippit, 2000). With advances in the sciences (in addition to philosophy and animal studies), this boundary is contested. It had hinged on what was known about biological and behavioural characteristics, including intentionality and language. It was Darwin, however, who developed these Western criteria, when the difference in evolutionary progress became the taxonomic tool for measuring and placing species on a hierarchical scale (Darwin, 1859). Different human ‘races’ were similarly placed on the scale creating a human taxonomy, where people of exotic appearance from distant (non-Western) lands were often placed at the bottom of this hierarchy and thereby along with the animals, denied possession of a soul (Elder, Wolch, & Emel, 1998).

Whilst visiting natural history collections around the UK, Europe and the USA, we have noticed that they are peppered with individual animal specimens with a ‘popular history’ – that is, animals that have been local or national favourites in zoo collections for many years, prior to dying and being stuffed and deposited in their local museum. Chi Chi the panda from London Zoo, Guy the gorilla, Jumbo the elephant, and many more – all public and media favourites in their time – occupy a strange but distinctive niche which contradicts the ‘animal-as-representative-of-species’ model, paradoxically and somewhat uncomfortably allowing the animal to retain the celebrity status befitting the former star of an emporium of popular culture, specifically the zoo. Here, where the normal course of events gives an ex-zoo animal a new and more serious currency as it passes into ‘the museum’, these individuals undergo a transformation. Coloured and even tainted by their unwitting colonisation of the affections and imagination of countless human admirers, they are destined to remain forever in a kind of limbo –neither assuming the ‘serious’, representative role of a natural history exhibit, nor sustaining their capacity to delight or command affection. Because we have registered the individual in these cases, the indignity of their having been stuffed and put on public display is made palpable.

Certain species have been historically singled out as lending themselves to anthropomorphism. Daston and Mitman(2005)refer to Stephen Gould – an evolutionary biologist who suggests that phylogeny and domestication are important components in addition to neotenic features in determining which non-human animals appeal to human animals. This anthropomorphic exercise has a dual edge to it. On the one hand it allows humans to demonstrate kindness towards the animal but, on the other, it also shows practical disregard in that, through anthropomorphic projection, the needs of the animal in question become secondary to our knowledge of humans, thereby undoubtedly distorting what we consider these needs to be. Despite our desire for closeness to seals and other sea mammals, the very nature of their water habitat limits not only our understanding but also our opportunities for observation and our attempts at fostering intimacy. In Icelandic culture (and others like it), the sea was, and to some extent still is seen as a source for food and nourishment upon which communities have depended through the ages for their survival. Furthermore, the ocean is considered by many to embody a history of the successful dominion of man over this natural resource, albeit an environment that continues to command respect in acknowledgment of its unpredictability and danger. Contemporary ecological concerns and the disappearance of certain species from territorial waters have enforced a re-thinking of established values, highlighting more intrinsic evaluations of nature.

A proposed meeting of human and animal

Three Attempts,(Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009) isaperformative video work that was initially made for an exhibition in the Seal Centre in Iceland in June 2007 but subsequently reworked as a crucial component of the installation between you and me. Having been made aware of the curiosity of seals and their apparent preference for bright colors, the artist (Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir) is seen kneeling down at the seashore overlooking an estuary with her back to the camera. Our preliminary research had revealed that it was common for hunters to imitate seal sounds when trying to entice the seal pups away from the cow, suggesting that seals were sensitive to certain types of sound or sound frequencies at least. In the initial video performance, a variety of vocal sounds was used, from singing to the imitation of mobile phone ringtones. Initial attempts prompted little in the way of ‘reciprocation’ on the part of the seals and nothing very much altered at all in their behaviour. The technical reasons why the work came to be remade are not in themselves important for this text, but rather the fact that they necessitated another visit, which resulted in giving us more than the remake we planned, to the extent that it became a completely new work. We are very much aware of the difficulties in attempting to remake works and it is something we generally try to avoid. Nevertheless the location was the same, as was the time of year – the same clothing was worn and we even began at the same time of day. Even the weather was similar. The only thing that seemed beyond our control that day was the behaviour of the non-human animals in the water – and sure enough, their response confounded our expectations. From the moment we arrived on the shore to set up the equipment, the seals made an appearance, popping up from the water, looking, playing, diving and reappearing. The ‘control’ had shifted from us to them – it was their game now.

 Our initial reaction was a sense of despair but slowly and convincingly it dawned on us that the only appropriate response was to be ‘with’ the seals in this moment. The performer soon relaxed into the role of the one being looked at, whilst visualizing the image being recorded in the rolling video camera behind – the back of a seated human being on black sand at the shore, the rippling, bright water revealing numerous dark heads popping in and out of view, against a backdrop of distant snow-topped mountains. The process of making this work is described here in order to draw attention to the requisite states of vulnerability and surrender necessary for its execution. This vulnerability is manifest in an image taken in a natural environment, of a lone figure with his/her back to ‘the watching world’. A sense of apprehension experienced by the artist is conveyed in the tentative approach of her performance. The unpredictable behaviour of the participant animals required an acceptance of the relinquishment of human control in this instance, and indeed its desirability.

Three Attempts is the embodiment of a number of principles underpinning our work and its functionality. From one perspective the work seems a novelty – its charm we’ve observed to be infectious and disarming. From another it touches on the absurd – it echoes with pathos and even melancholy. It’s difficult to see the work without acknowledging a degree of sentimentality but in common with absurdity and vulnerability our rejection of sentiment is a cultured, negative response based on the desirability of strength through the application of intellect. At this juncture, we ask what if intellect alone is not enough for us to understand our new and challenged position in the world? Indeed, what if the rationality of our approach obscures or limits the possibilities of wider understanding? All the readings mentioned above are indeed embedded in the work and yet just as crucially, they serve to cohere, fuel and extend another more fundamental reading – that ‘landscape’, if it is to mean anything in the future, must cease to be an objectifying term, which denotes something to be looked at or used whilst simultaneously functioning as a register of our detachment from it. Just as we increasingly understand that other animals are specifically such in relation to the constitution of their dwelling, so we must recognize our own interdependence with habitat and the danger that by sustaining our unfettered and exploitative use of ‘resources’, including land and ‘animal others’, we resolutely keep our backs turned against the illuminating and rewarding conversation we might otherwise have.

What is clear is that the cultural deployment of animal representations in general seeks or manages to frame and delimit our understanding of the animal whereas art of the kind proposed in the above examples may test these preconceptions and force them open for reappraisal. Because most representations are constructed to perform some agenda of our own – in the case of animals, to entertain; to inform; to provide food; to remember; to stand for all others of its species; to symbolize human behavioural characteristics, etc. – in this process, the animal itself is occluded. It is eclipsed by its avatar or likeness, which is always a simplification and therefore must accordingly signify a loss. The work the naming of things scrutinizes and we believe reveals the flawed nature of the presumption and pitfalls in our attempts to close up and enforce a reductive approach in our world-view. In juxtaposition to the other works (the interviews, Three Attempts etc) in the exhibition between you and me,it allows us the space to think through and thus challenge what we have come to believe it is to be ‘animal’, what it is to be ‘human’, and what indeed is ‘landscape’, and to consider the consequences of the abbreviated forms with which we populate our intellect and our experience. Since it is upon these accepted but polarising constructions that we human animals base our behaviour towards other species and to our environment, at this time it seems appropriate to dig deep and deploy necessarily unconventional methods in order to reappraise their contemporary validity.

REFERENCES

Boyle, R. 1660. Spring and Weight of the Air. Oxford: H.Hall.

Chaudhuri, U. 2007. (De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance TDR: The Drama Review, 51(1), 8-20.

Darwin, C. 1859. The Origin of Species. London: Johan Murray.

Daston, L., & Mitman, G. 2005. Thinking with Animals, New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Donald, D. 2007. Picturing Animals in Britain. Singapore: Yale University.

DW-WORLD.DE. 2007. Stuffed Giraffe Could Become Star of Documenta Show.   Retrieved 19.10, 2009, from http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2616936,00.html

Elder, G., Wolch, J., & Emel, J. 1998. Le Pratique Sauvage: Race, Place and the Human-Animal Divide. In J. Wolch & J. Emel (Eds.), Animal Geographies, Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands pp. 72-89. London: Verso.

Friedl, P. (Artist). 2007. Brownie.

Gane, N. 2006. We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? : Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7-8), 135-158.

Halberstam, J. 2007. Pixarvolt- Animation and Revolt.   Retrieved 19.10.2009, 2009, from http://flowtv.org/?p=739

Haraway, D. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hirst, D. (Artist). 1990. A Thoursand Years.

Lippit, A. M. 2000. electric animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lorimer, H. 2008. Taking place: non-representational theories and human geography. Unpublished article – Anderson,B & Harrison, P (eds) 2009, (Ashgate, London).

Pickenett, L., & Prince, C. 2006. The Turin Shroud; How Da Vinci Fooled History. New York: Touchstone: Simon and Schuster.

Rupke, N. A. 1987. Vivisection in Historical Perspective: Routledge.

Schama, S. 1995. Landscape & Memory. London: Fontana Press.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. 2006. nanoq: flat out and bluesome, A Cultural Life of Polar Bears. London: Black Dog.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson (Artists). 2009. between you and me [Installation].

Wolfe, C. 2003. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wright, J. (Artist). 1768. Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump [Painting].

 

 

What We Can Do: Art Methodologies and Parities in Meeting

A toe in muddy waters

The equally manifest senses of purpose, enthusiasm and urgency generated within animal studies groups internationally over the last few years have led many to adopt a position of righteousness and an acceptance of greater commonality between human and non-human animals, bound up in a broad set of sensibilities kindled by the residual sparks of late 20th Century race, gender and sexuality conflicts.

Much has been written and much read and from this basis and a back catalogue of theoretical discourse has provided the framework not only of thought but of response and discursive action.

The irony in this seems to be that in sanctioning a dependency on the same learned and developed faculties, those of language, the absence of which in other species has been traditionally used to demonstrate our distance from and superiority to non-human animals, we continue to distinguish and distance ourselves from, rather than draw any closer to our subject and by so doing compromise the possibility of the ‘otherness’ of understanding that might otherwise accrue around alternative approaches to animals. Where such approaches are attempted, the results are often dismissed as being fanciful – impossible to evaluate on the simple grounds of their intrinsic lack of accountability by means of rational analysis.

Whilst it is perfectly possible to imagine a useful analysis of an ‘other’ understanding through language, such understanding may prove only to be achievable in the first instance by some other means – through for instance the honing and application of intuition and instincts – faculties which although they may vary in degree and mechanics between species, nevertheless are shared tools by which all species may sense and ‘read’ the world. In relation to anthropocentric perspectives and human superior capacity of self awareness and linguistic expression it is worth noting recent research on the brains of whales particularly humpback and finback as it has revealed a close similarity to the structures of the human brain. Large quantities of spindle cells considered to link us humans to a higher cognitive awareness and allow us to feel love and suffer emotionally have been identified (Patrick R. Hof, 2006). Hof quoted in the New Scientist says: “We must be careful about anthropomorphic interpretation of intelligence in whales” (Coghlan, 2006). Considering that these faculties have developed in whales for considerably longer time than in humans could thus possibly mean that their skills of communication including the application of intuition and instincts are developed beyond human understanding. These scantily understood faculties within ourselves, despite their sophistication and precision are indeed subjugated and marginalised by our dependence on ‘our’ language and as a consequence whilst continuing to serve us and our survival in more ways daily than is comprehendible, are all too often considered to be it seems, residual, archaic and primitive.

Art practice, that positions itself between subject and audience, in order to raise questions about routine behaviour and habitual thought, offers a way forward which may fly in the face of acceptable logic but in so doing, asks disturbing and/or constructively disorienting questions. Beyond the strictures of the spoken and written word, its capacity is to deploy image, sound or more generally, the speculative juxtaposition of disparate elements and to gather and compare observations through an encounter. It does not aim to find reductive solutions or conclusions but to instigate the possibility that we, individually or collectively, may practically look again and see with new eyes how things in the world are configured. In our own (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s ) art practice we apply relationality as a keystone of our methodology to encourage within the viewer/audience, a greater sense of connectivity and hopefully as a consequence, a more holistic understanding. In this respect we acknowledge the philosophy of the eco feminist Val Plumwood as exercised in her article Being Prey (O´Reilly, 2000). Here she places human animals on a par with non-human animals in that just as other species are prey to us, humans may equally be objectified as prey, from the perspective of the animal. Similarly, Bruno Latour (2004) in his theories on the collective, proposes that we turn the clock back to a time before humans began classifying some beings as belonging to nature and others as belonging to societies or culture. In defining non-humans, amongst other phenomena he includes; species, water currents, machines, documents and so on and proposes in his Actor Network Theory or ANT that human and non-human be treated alike. His theories and writings have also contributed to our keenness to promote relationality as being part of our art practice. The themes we explore in our artwork therefore and indeed which are developed in part in this paper, are intended to clear a space for the conceptualization of a new lens by which such scrutiny and analysis might be conducted. In fact in contemporary art in general, the presentation of an effective framework by which questions are configured is often the most specific intention, allowing a plurality of responses to occupy the vacuum that is thereby created.

In this article we hope to unravel the methodologies employed by our collaborative practice in which we propose challenges to the anthropocentric systems of convenience that sanction a daily acceptance of loss-through-representation, suggesting instead as a way of investigation, the alternative idea of ‘parities in meeting’. Furthermore we hope to explore what drives our shifting regard for non-human animals (such as it is), the degree to which this too is ultimately self-serving and whether it be a fleeting or a growing phenomenon.

Through the work we ask to what extent any true or ‘better’ understanding of non-human animals is related to closeness, empathic alignment or indeed immersion with those we have traditionally regarded as the ‘other’. And in ‘looking’ at animals, are we looking towards a closer understanding and engagement with non-human species or are we really only productively able to scrutinize ourselves as detached, rather than participatory observers?

The human supremacist: a journey into darkness Maehle and Tröhler (1987) recorded that the experiments of one of Vesalius’ pupils, Realdo Colombo (1516–59), involving pregnant dogs, were greatly admired by members of the Catholic clergy:

Colombo pulled a foetus out of the dog’s womb and, hurting the young in front of the bitch’s eyes, he provoked the latter’s furious barking. But as soon as he held the puppy to the bitch’s mouth, the dog started licking it tenderly, being obviously more concerned about the pain of its offspring than about its own suffering. When something other than the puppy was held in front of its mouth, the bitch snapped at it in a rage. The clergymen expressed their pleasure in observing this striking example of motherly love even in the ‘brute creation’ (Maehle N.R, 1987,18)

In relation to accounts such as these which in today’s terms, for many of us seem unequivocal in their cruelty, we would want to orientate the reader at some distant point on a spectrum of human/non-human animal encounters – to begin in other words with closeness of kinship rather than with the objectification that is required in order to enact such cruelty and abuse.

When imagining encounters of any kind in respect of other species it may be useful to re-examine definitions in order for us to clarify, the nature of what is going on. We need to look at issues such as contrivance and spontaneity. In terms of the encounter; who if any has arranged the meeting; are both parties equally caught unawares – has it happened by chance?

To answer these questions considerations regarding captivity, domestication, wildness and the parameters of contact might be helpful. Does the meeting take place under conditions where one party does not have the freedom enjoyed by the other? Do the circumstances of the meeting or engagement mean that a degree of familiarity between the parties already exists? Familiarity and indeed the closely related ‘trust’, suggest a reliance on learning and memory.

In wildness we can presume the least preparation in respect of our encounters to occur. Here we may expect the unexpected. In hunting and shooting expeditions, taking place in the wild and indeed in those concerned with wildlife photography the relationship is once more slewed; the animal has been tracked down, the encounter staged resulting either in a dead animal body on the ground or in the analogue/digital traces of some oblivious animal being stored on film or the camera’s memory card (Ryan, 2000).

When we consider the types of communication possible between humans and other vertebrates – including humans, birds, mammals, reptiles, we can be confident that in our encounters and subsequent engagement, there are broadly three shared senses by which communication may be transmitted or received. For us these are; sound, vision and touch.

Sound is carried predominately through vocalizations – we vocalize and for our own purposes might use words, but our intonation is the quality most likely to be effective in any communication, just as we may not understand the specifics of what another may be expressing but through its intonation we communicate with both subtlety and something more akin to parity.

Despite the faculty of sight too often being considered in modern Western European tradition as the most ‘objective’ sense because in fact it is least involved with the object of observation, visual signals between vertebrates can nevertheless be extremely eloquent also in shaping our mutual understanding of one another. From appearance both parties may express fear, submission, ease, excitement, agitation, boredom, affection and so on by the way we hold, carry or disport ourselves. What is not intuited may be learned. Berger (1972) has pointed out that “seeing comes before words” meaning that a visually able child recognizes through vision before it speaks. He goes on to propose that later in life there is a tension in the relationship between what we know and what we see and that tension is always active (Berger, 1972, 7).

To us touch seems to be the most compelling means of letting another know our intentions towards the other. By touch, we cross a physical threshold directly and it is through the acceptance of touch by the other that in the same instant, we claim for ourselves his or her acceptance of us and importantly, we render him or her vulnerable. Simultaneously we ourselves must be prepared to be made vulnerable by this process. Perhaps it is for the power we identify in touch as a register of trust, that stories abound which indicate that so many of us seem intent on absolute proximity, if not intimacy with other species, as a means of expressing or exercising an empathetic connection with an other. The desire for an empirical manifestation of this trust will drive people to perform acts which may often be perceived by others to be alternately foolhardy, rash, outrageously intrusive, dangerous and certainly irrational. Ron Broglio has pointed out that ‘traditionally, touch has been considered less ‘objective’, because it is involved/enmeshed with the other. It can be said to embrace intersubjectivity and thus a certain kind of messiness. But an acceptance of some scruffiness may be a necessary consequence of unhitching ourselves from the locomotive of reason’.

When researching for the project between you and me (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009) we interviewed a young farmer, Knútur Óskarsson at Ósum in the north west of Iceland. Besides continuing to manage a depleted farm business he also ran a youth hostel and services for tourists. There is a seal colony on the margins of his farm and some years ago it was a valuable resource in terms of its meat and skin. Today the seals have another, more intrinsic value as a tourist resource. Óskarsson has not however capitalized on this resource directly by charging for instance a fee. Instead he sees it as his role to inform visitors about the seal as an animal whose importance is critical to the nature of this area. It can be observed but has to be left to take care of itself. For the tourists he has installed a gate and a fenced off path of about 500 metres leading to the seashore. From there the seals can be observed swimming in the estuary or lying on the sand flats across it. The information that Óskarsson provides is in the form of conversation – no signs or leaflets are available. In our interview with him he described some of the many different approaches people have to this animal.

I mean people are no good some people want to kill them and then I have people who want to make love to them and I am not joking just seriously want to make love to them. I had this discussion I remember [with] this German girl – I said. “ Hey you cannot make love to a seal. If you would get close enough it would bite you and it is a bad bite with infection”. This is how it is. I think people have to be educated in psychology and I am really not interested in why she had this [idea] but I have met quite many people like this and the thing is today people have not the right ideas about nature. Many people have these Disney ideas, unrealistic ideas about nature – that is the main problem. The second problem is [that] people are takers. They don’t respect nature. They don’t allow the seals to lie there and have their own habits. They just want to take and consume and then they are gone. I remember this German guy who took off all his clothes and this was a warm summer night and he was lucky that he did not kill himself because the streams are quite rough and then he was standing there totally naked and swam over to the other side because he wanted to go and scratch the seals behind the ears or something or I mean what ever he wanted to do. He did that and of course the seals went away but this was on low tide but then he had this problem – he didn’t think this through. He had this problem because he was standing on the other side naked his clothes were on this side and the tide came in and there is quite a difference so he actually had to walk. [It] took him the whole night, about 18km and the funny part about the story [was] not in the next farm but the one next to it is living this really nice old farmer Joey, a really nice old man and he was driving on his tractor down on the fields [on an] old Massey Ferguson. Then he saw what seemed to be a naked man walking on the black sand waving. He just thought I am hallucinating I am seeing things that are not real. So he drove home and went into bed again and the man was there [waving] help, help… (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009)

The acts, which sit outside the ‘norms’ of behaviour will often by definition invite criticism. Before rushing to condemn, we should remember that in seeking to examine the nature of communication with other species in any terms other than those of a one-way street of human interest and power, (obedience, subordination etc), we expose ourselves to accusations of a kind of idiocy – simply because in so doing, we too buck the established consensus that animals are either provided for us and must therefore serve our needs, or alternatively are to be observed at a distance, (often for human reasons of science, taxonomy, surveying, tourism etc) for their intrinsic value – or finally, to be ignored entirely.

Timothy Treadwell (1957–2003) was an environmentalist who over a long period conducted his own studies on the grizzly bears in the Katmai National Park in Alaska. The study involved living with the grizzlies for 13 seasons before finally, with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard he was killed and devoured by the bear(s). Treadwell, made famous in a film by Werner Herzog entitled Grizzly Man, was not scientifically trained, but saw himself as a protector of these animals (Treadwell, 1999).

In Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man (2005), Timothy Treadwell is portrayed as weak. This fragility or weakness, placed in parallel to an exercise of power and control in the guise of the director, opens up a different way of looking; one in which the gaze is turned in on itself. The idiosyncratic voice-over, and the consistent transparency of the opinions in Herzog’s narration, contribute to the exposure of a clutch of binaries; sane versus insane, conventional versus unconventional, circumspect versus rash. Similarly these binaries also reveal the inconsistencies and gaps in a human being’s authoritative rationality, on one hand declaring the deceased to have been a trespasser in the space of the other, but on the other exercising a punishment on the ‘non-human animal’, who is not allowed to exercise power on or over human animal beings who knowingly encroach on its world. In the film, Larry Van Daele, a bear biologist, explains Treadwell’s mistake and what distinguishes him from those scientifically trained, in that he tried to understand the bears through attempting to ‘be a bear’. To empathize is seen to be tantamount to anthropomorphization, the projection of human emotion or behaviour onto the animal, a trait often associated disreputably with pet keeping and the domestication of animals. Due to its ‘wildness’, from this perspective, a bear is seen to be beyond subjection to such frivolous associations. But in order to empathize, to ‘get under the skin of another’, one has to try to imagine how the other feels, whether the other is human or animal, and this strategy might instead be seen as a first step towards carving a transitional space in which human and non-human species meet on renewed terms to the benefit of both.

In Thomas Nagel’s essay What is it Like to Be a Bat? (1974) he points out that we know a lot about bats, that they perceive the world around them through sonar or echolocation, sending high frequency shrieks in order to detect objects and prey within their range and to determine from the consequent echoes, precise information concerning distance, shape, substance and motion. Nagel goes on to say:

But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion. (Nagel, 1974, 83-84)

The essay goes some way towards expressing the impossibility of imagining the experience of others with any degree of success, particularly when such awareness is based on the acknowledgement of profound difference. But if we are to move at all, we must use what tools we can and navigate between the recognition of differences on the one hand and the identification of similarities, to the heart of what has become a cultural nexus of contradiction. It is not only Treadwell who displays anthropomorphic tendencies when it comes to the grizzlies. The pilot (Sam Egli) who over the years flew Treadwell out to the Grizzly Maze, goes a step further in suggesting that the bears accepted Treadwell for so long because of his perceived slight insanity. Interestingly and paradoxically, Sam Egli seems to believe that the bears are able to detect whether people are sane or not, and act accordingly. He even goes so far as trying to imagine what the bear that killed Treadwell and his girlfriend Amy Hugenard was thinking. Similarly, Herzog makes reference to the ‘blank stare’ of the bear, signifying dispassionate boredom that can ‘also be seen in strangers that we meet in the street in cities’ (Herzog, 2005).

In Treadwell’s own video footage from which the film was largely constituted, he can be seen to ‘encounter’ the bears in a spirit of equality, landing him simultaneously in what Donna Haraway has referred to as “concatenated worlds” (Gane, 2006, 145). The fact that he met his death at the claws of this species is not a desired end and is not intended here to act as an exemplar for the post-humanist interspecies perspective pursued in this text but it was an end which in the film Treadwell was realistic enough to envisage for himself. In Grizzly Man Treadwell’s ‘idiocy’ is suggested and played on by Herzog to marginalize Treadwell himself and in so doing, to reinforce the old established line between preconceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. It is exactly the inevitability of this cultural perception that Val Plumwood took on and challenged when writing of being subjected to three death rolls during her near fatal encounter with a crocodile (O´Reilly, 2000). Treadwell’s death is used as a demonstration of the consequences that await those who cross the ‘invisible line’. It is in fact this modernist inclination to such polarities that sustains and activates anew the fear of the other and thus lends a particular and dubious purpose to the Herzog film. Had another perspective been drawn it might have acknowledged the achievement of Treadwell and the role that his particular, scientifically transgressive, ‘amateur’ approach played in reappraising boundaries between species.

What is rarely acknowledged in most stories of human and animal encounters is the imposition that such proximity constitutes for the animals in question. In the case of the wild animal, the model is already there in respect of our extincting of species, because historically we have taken insufficient care to anticipate the consequences of our proximity and interaction. Perhaps just as pertinently, in the case of other human cultures and civilizations, where the terms of engagement were unequal (i.e not based on consensus exchange and trade) our impact has all too often been devastating. The term ‘consenting adults’ springs to mind as an equivalence, not in anyway to infantilize the other but as a means of identifying the disparity that can exist in encounters between cultures and species where the integrity of one party is unequivocally compromised – in short where there is a profound imbalance of power.

Limina: meetings on the shore

When we (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson) propose the concept ‘parities in meeting’, paradoxical in its human conceptualization as this may sound, it is with such considerations of history and trepidation in mind. And if it is not too fanciful therefore, we propose also an approach that imagines a relationship that is uncompromising, between consenting species.

In 2009 we exhibited the installation work between you and me at the Kalmar Konstmuseum, in Kalmar, Sweden. A smaller version of the project had previously been shown in Australia as part of the international conference Minding Animals in the same year. The research focus for this had been the relationships between seals and humans around the coast of Iceland and one component was a performative video work entitled Three Attempts, (2009). We had been made aware of the curiosity of seals and their apparent preference for bright colors, and in the video we observe Snæbjörnsdóttir, dressed in an orange anorak, approach the seashore overlooking an estuary and kneel down facing towards the sea with her back to the camera. Our preliminary research had revealed that it was common for hunters to imitate seal sounds when trying to entice the seal pups away from the cow, suggesting that seals were sensitive to certain types of sound or sound frequencies at least. In the initial video performance, a variety of vocal sounds were used, from singing to the imitation of ring tones from mobile phones. Initial attempts prompted little in the way of ‘reciprocation’ on the part of the seals and nothing very much altered at all in their behaviour. The technical reasons why the work was remade are not, in themselves, important for this text but rather, the fact that they necessitated another visit, which resulted in giving us more than the remake we planned, to the extent that it became a completely new work. We are very much aware of the difficulties in attempting to remake works and it is something we generally try to avoid. Nevertheless, for the reshoot the location was the same, as was the time of year – the same clothing was worn and we even began at the same time of day. Even the weather was similar. The only thing it seemed, beyond our control that day, was the behaviour of the non-human animals in the water, and sure enough, their response confounded our expectations. From the moment we arrived on the shore, to set up the equipment, the seals made an appearance, popping up from the water, looking, playing, diving and reappearing. The ‘control’ had shifted from us to them – it was their game now. Our initial reaction was a sense of despair but slowly and convincingly it dawned on us that the only appropriate response was to be ‘with’ the seals in this moment. The performer soon relaxed into the role of the one being looked at, whilst visualizing the image being recorded in the rolling video camera behind – the back of a seated human being on black sand at the shore, the rippling, bright water revealing numerous dark heads popping in and out of view, against a backdrop of distant snow-topped mountains. The process of making this work is described here in order to draw attention to the requisite states of vulnerability and surrender necessary for its execution. This vulnerability is manifest in an image taken in a natural environment, of a lone figure with his/her back to ‘the watching world’. A sense of apprehension experienced by the artist is conveyed in the tentative approach of her performance. The unpredictable behaviour of the participant animals required an acceptance of the relinquishment of human control in this instance, and indeed its desirability. Three Attempts is the embodiment of a number of principles underpinning our work and its functionality. From one perspective the work seems a novelty – its charm we’ve observed to be infectious and disarming. From another it touches on the absurd – it echoes with pathos and even melancholy. It’s difficult to see the work without acknowledging a degree of sentimentality but in common with absurdity and vulnerability our rejection of sentiment is a cultured, negative response based on the desirability of strength through the application of intellect.

A current discourse has emerged (most recently and notably in the Arts Catalyst exhibition Interspecies 2008/9, Manchester/London) surrounding the potentiality of human, non-human ‘collaboration’. It was suggested during the Interspecies seminar in London in which we took part that the work Three Attempts falls into a category of human/animal art collaboration – occupying as it does a space in which human and non-human animals meet and interact. In this work Snæbjörnsdóttir chose not to enter the space of the seal (namely the sea) but sat instead on the shore, as close to the sea level as possible. Notwithstanding this acknowledgement of ‘threshold’, we allow that there was, to a certain degree a division of power as it was clearly ‘our’ work; we directed the camera and the scene was framed for a project in which the seals had no editorial say.

When talking about collaboration with animals we have to begin by defining what we mean by collaboration. For us it is understood to be an act agreed to by all parties concerned. An attempt is made to establish some form of framework where individual powers are respectively channelled constructively for the overall benefit of the collaborative project. That said, any implicit equality of roles or contribution tends to be compromised when one party alone draws up the parameters at the outset, and this compromise may only be partly assuaged by responsiveness to unpredictable developments arising from the behaviour of the other party. In short, if a way cannot be found in which to negotiate equal terms for the collaboration – it’s not collaboration. In attempting to understand the possibilities of human, non-human animal collaboration we human animals still seem reluctant to let go of the reins or to find ways of working with what is there rather than what we would like or can contrive to be there. In this respect we may all too easily be seen to be treating others as circus animals. An animal might do unusual tricks for example, or be instrumentalised to become the mechanism by which something of ourselves is revealed, but we need to be able to see that behind that use is an implicit loss of freedom for the animal, a loss of identity, and a likely physical, psychological or ethical abuse. In short, through representation the animal itself is lost. The dichotomy is one born out of our own dependence on power and intentionality and revolves forever around issues of integrity and relationality. If we accept the integrity of dynamic relationships we can go forward in this, but with caution and respect for matters we cannot presume fully to understand.

The politics of play

What may not ultimately be easily explained or justified is the purpose of our interest in this suggested parity, beyond its being generally a good or tantalisingly desirable thing. It seems good because it bucks an accepted behavioural trope in relation to the other. Good because in doing so we may discover something which may for a long time have been overlooked – a consequence of staying within the bounds of acceptable behaviour and of being so sure of our separateness and distinctiveness, when in fact, any natural extrapolation of evolutionary theory actually seems to unravel most claims for the specialness of our case. We believe that other species may have much more commonality with us than is recognized, which we just don’t or can’t see because the type of knowledge upon which we have come to rely that provides us with and supports our world view, precludes it. Because we share a world with other species, why would we not be interested in the principals of interconnectivity when an eschewal of such interest for so long has left us unprepared for all manner of environmental effects and consequence?

Not long after embarking on a trek in Hornstrandir in the far northwest of Iceland during July of 1999, our paths crossed with some of the denizens of that area, most memorably, an arctic fox in its dark, summer pelage. The animal actually sought us out, clearly having noticed us from afar and as he trotted towards us, we became aware of his purposeful if casual approach only as he drew near. Hornstrandir is a reserve area of around 240 square miles, almost entirely unpopulated by humans. The fox has no predators here and when humans show up from time to time he is far more curious than wary. In fact this was more the case then, than in 2009 as ten years ago the visits of tourists were less frequent. It can nevertheless be suggested that since this was a nature reserve, the fox had also learned that humans bring disposable food with them, thereby providing an easy meal for the day. As for us, we were sluggish under the weight of nine days shelter and provisions – he was light, inquisitive and in the mood for a game. And this is just what ensued. Once up close he began to leap and bound around us, feigning attacks and withdrawals in rapid succession and behaving as much like an adolescent pet pup as is imaginable. The surprise of course was not that he was in many ways ‘like a dog’, but simply that he was playing in such a disarmingly relaxed manner around aliens on his patch. Both here in the encounter with the fox and previously with the seals when making the work Three Attempts we have found it appropriate to deploy words such as ‘game’ or ‘play’ in order to elucidate not just the apparent nature of the respective meetings, but also a form of exchange or communication, significantly, beyond words. It is in a particular type of play involving the feint, the lunge and equally rapid withdrawal, the teasing appearance and disappearance, intended there is no doubt, to provoke a response, that body language is seen conspicuously to take precedence over other forms, allowing a genuine trade of reflexes, privileging intuition and instinct.

The performance of Joseph Beuys I Like America and America Likes Me, (1974) has been referenced innumerable times in animal studies’ discourse and will no doubt continue to be referenced for many proper reasons in the future. For the purpose of this text we raise it again as in the footage that survives the event, an evolving relationship can be detected between the two protagonists, Beuys and the wild, but environmentally compromised coyote, Little John. The coyote was imported into a loft gallery space in New York, (from whence is frustratingly unclear) in order to meet and cohabit for three days with the artist. Their relationship begins with a degree of wariness on the part of both – wariness and respect. Whilst it is conceivable that Beuys consciously deployed respect in his dealings with the coyote and that conceptually this was always strategically going to be the case, the documentation of their meeting nevertheless seems to reveal a study in inquisitive negotiation and the process of two beings getting to know one another in unfamiliar surroundings.

Back in Hornstrandir, our fox, with all the freedom in his world to choose, bobbed and darted around us for a good fifteen minutes as we walked; we laughed and yes, spoke to him and around the time we sat down to take off our boots in order to cross a river, he became bored and scampered off in the direction of a distant flock of seabirds he’d spotted at the river mouth. Ten minutes later a commotion of startled gulls signalled his mischievous arrival amongst them. Since 2007 we have been researching for a project entitled Uncertainty in the City commissioned by the Storey Gallery in Lancaster. As part of this project we designed a mobile radio station called Radio Animal that we have been touring around England and at the beginning of October 2009 we took it to London as part of the Interspecies project mentioned above. Radio Animal has been investigating contested spaces and our conflicting categorizations of what constitutes a pest. Among those that we interviewed in London was the acclaimed historian and one of the founders of the British Animal Studies Network Dr. Erica Fudge. Fudge told the story of a mouse (or mice) inhabiting her kitchen and how by giving it a name, she had overcome her antipathy towards this animal. Giving an animal a proper name is a common identification strategy in nature studies applied equally often but for different reasons by those working scientifically for instance like Ian Douglas-Hamilton in his study of elephants (Mitman, 2005) and for amateurs such as Timothy Treadwell in his study of Grizzly bears (Herzog, 2005). But as a means of bestowing individuality in order to reduce anxiety we detect another more telling dynamic. In 2009 we were invited to give a talk at Sheffield Hallam University as part of a series of events entitled Transmission: Host, which explored the concept of The Stranger. Our host was Chloë Brown and together we made a bookwork as part of the series, in respect of which the editor Sharon Kivland, quotes Jacques Derrida.

the stranger is the one who is irreconcilably ‘other’ to oneself, but with whom one may co-exist without hostility, to whom one must respond and to whom one is responsible. The stranger reminds one of the other at the heart of one’s being (Brown, 2009)

Applied in this context the statement could be seen to suggest our desire strategically to accept the animal through the identification within ourselves of a parallel and correspondent ‘other’. A further qualification of this would arise from considering the dynamic of naming as ‘owning’ and Fudge herself has described the act as a kind of co-opting of the mouse into a kind of ‘pet hood’.

We are not alone

At this juncture, we ask what if intellect alone is not enough for us to understand our new and challenged position in the world? Indeed, what if the rationality of our approach obscures or limits the possibilities of wider understanding? Ultimately the video work Three Attempts is not solely concerned with our relationship to the seal, but is a ‘landscape’ work, that simultaneously acknowledges the integrity of landscape and its constituents whilst interrogating what the term has come to represent. The back of the artist is turned towards the lens of the camera, which is the eye that we human-animals so easily and often mistake as our own in perceiving and understanding the world. It is an insinuation between the audience and the event, which it partially occludes. All the readings mentioned in the previous chapter, of charm, absurdity, pathos, melancholy, sentimentality, vulnerability are indeed embedded and to be found in the work and yet just as crucially, they serve to fuel and extend another more fundamental reading – that ‘landscape’ or ‘environment’ if they are to mean anything in the future, must cease to be objectifying terms, which describe ‘something to be looked at’ or used whilst simultaneously functioning as registers of our detachment from them. Just as increasingly we understand that other animals are specifically so in relation to the constitution of their dwelling, so we must nurture a larger economy of thought and larger sense of community recognizing our own interdependence with habitat and the danger that by sustaining our unfettered and exploitative use of ‘resources’, including land and ‘animal others’ we resolutely keep our backs turned on the enlightening and rewarding conversation we might otherwise have.

Where the cultural deployment of animal representations in general seeks or has managed to frame and delimit our understanding of the non-human animal, it is hoped that art of the kind proposed in the above examples can test such practices and invite a reappraisal of these relationships. Because most representations are constructed to perform some agenda of our own – in the case of animals, to entertain, to inform, to provide food, to stand for all of a species, to symbolize human behavioural characteristics etc – in this process, the animal itself is occluded – eclipsed by its avatar or likeness, which is always a simplification and therefore must accordingly signify a loss. In another component of the installation between you and me the audience is invited to follow at close quarters the transition of a real although dead animal body as it is made to become a representation of itself. The work entitled, the naming of things (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 2009), scrutinizes and we believe reveals the flawed nature of the presumption and pitfalls of our attempts to close up and enforce a reductive approach in our world-view. In juxtaposition to the other works (the series of interviews, Three Attempts etc) in the exhibition it allows us the space to think through and thus challenge what we have come to believe it is to be ‘animal’, what it is to be ‘human’ and what indeed is ‘landscape’ and to consider the consequences of the abbreviated forms with which we populate our intellect and our experience. Since it is upon these accepted but polarising constructions that we human-animals base our behaviour towards other species and to our environment, at this time it seems appropriate to be digging deep and deploying whatever methods may be at our disposal in order to reappraise their contemporary validity.

So with this in mind, consider our experience as we made our way on foot one morning along the southern perimeter of Hyde Park in London. It was autumnal, sunny and we were deep in conversation as we walked. The traffic was medium, to medium-heavy. The nature of the conversation is not remembered but we do recall that out of the blue, we were interrupted by a voice, clearly intoned over the noise of the traffic. The voice said, ‘hello’. Immediately, we stopped in our tracks. Ahead there was no one to be seen and as we looked behind, there was nobody even within shouting distance. The voice came again, ‘hello’ this time clearly from overhead. We looked up and there, perched on a telegraph wire directly above us was a crow. He/she stared at us inquisitively and as we gaped, said it again. Naturally, we returned the salutation and this time the crow reciprocated. We stood there, the two of us on the pavement and the crow aloft, for over five minutes, exchanging greetings in a bewilderingly agreeable and curiously private encounter on that warm fall day.

Crows are great mimics. Unlike many species, we recognize and acknowledge their intelligence (because we think it is like our own). This bird, free as it seemed, may well have been trained when young by a carer, to say some words. Notwithstanding this, to be deliberately and formally addressed by a member of another species, so unexpectedly and in English, was simultaneously both uncanny and touching and it reminds us of the childhood wish exercised so exhaustively in literature and film, that the animals could talk. In the same way a contemporary desire is expressed for a genuinely collaborative relationship between humans and other species, it’s clear that intentionality is the key to the viability of such a project. In the absence of a common, syntax-based language we must continue to look elsewhere to facilitate and develop any possible symbioses of purpose.

REFERENCES:

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.

Beuys, J. (Artist). (1974). I Like America and America Likes Me.

Brown, C., & Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. (2009). Transmission: Host. London: Artwords.

Coghlan, A. (2006). Whales boast the brain cells that ‘make us human’. Retrieved 4th of January 2010, from NewScientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10661-whales-boast-the-brain-cells-that-make-us-human.html

Gane, N. (2006). We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? : Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7-8), 135-158.

Herzog, W. (Writer). (2005). Grizzly Man. In A. W. H. Film (Producer). UK: revolver entertainment.

Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge:Harvard University Press.

Maehle N.R, T. (1987).Vivisection in Historical Perspective: Routledge.

Mitman, G. (2005). Pachyderm Personalities: The Media of Science, Politics and Conservation. In L. Daston & M. Gregg (Eds.), Thinking with Animals, New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (pp. 175-196). New York: Columbia University Press.

Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosphical Review, 83(4).

O´Reilly, J. (2000). Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying: Travelers’ Tales.

Patrick R. Hof, E. V. d. G. (2006). The structure of the Cerebral cortex of the Humpback Whale, megaptera novaeangliae (Cetacea, Mysticeti, Balaenopteridae). The Anatomical Record,, 10.

Ryan, J. (2000). ‘Hunting with the camera’: photography, wildlife and colonialism in Africa. In C. Philo & C. Wilbert (Eds.), animal spaces, beastly places, new geographies of human – animal relations (pp. 203-222). London, New York: Routledge.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson (Artist). (2009). between you and me [Installation].

Treadwell, T. (1999). Among the Grizzlies: Ballantine Books.

Understandings of artistic research

Much has been written on artistic research and its place within the academic context. In an attempt to contribute to this debate and answer the questions proposed, I have chosen to write about it from my own experience as an artist working with a research-based art practice for over ten years and having completed a practice-based PhD at Gothenburg University in 2009. From my perspective, doing artistic research is similar to conducting any investigation in which one makes selected decisions to reach a desired result. In the arts, the desired result is unlikely to be predicated on finding a solution to a predetermined query. Rather, it is to embrace an experimental approach in which the unexpected is to be encouraged.

In my considerations on artistic research I have chosen to give little credence to debates surrounding intrinsic differences and refer to research as a transferable activity equally applicable to all academic disciplines including the arts. For me personally, as someone already navigating a multicultural and multi-linguistic zone on a daily basis through my Icelandic native language, my adopted language English, and the Swedish of my professional environment, the debate concerning the inherent meaning of the word “research” is revealed as being too much about semiotics. As such, it all too often sidelines itself by this process and serves as a distraction from what is really important for us here, that is the research that happens to be conducted in the arts. In matters of definition it is always useful to remember that the starting point must be an acknowledgement that “research” is just a word, like most others an academic exercise in the place-marking of meaning (semiotic) and necessarily flawed in its acceptance as such of the inherent limitations that come with textual language and its gendered and colonial history.

Being part of an academic artistic research program and thus working within an institutional framework should not require us to limit or reduce anything of the artistic processes. One could consider it as yet another framework/structure that artists must or might choose to negotiate in the process of transition from studio to public exposition. Contemporary artists are used to engaging with different contexts and the framework that each will require or allow. In many cases these are politically charged informing and impacting constructively upon the development and the final readings of the work. The same applies within an academic context, but it will be the choice of the artist concerned to situate his/her ideas within that framework. Further nuance is applied in the degree of visibility or concealment of such factors within the presented work. The idea that the academic context will lead to novel forms of perception or consciousness is an imponderable in general terms. It is dependent on the artwork and the form that such engagement with context takes. Following on from this, being part of a PhD program should not result in a method being applied on top of an art practice, the method should already be there inherent within/ intrinsic to the artwork/practice. Participating in courses and discourse as part of the program may help to identify, locate and fine-tune an artistic method.

From my perspective there is no doubt that serious research goes on within the arts and that there is an immense value in artistic research to non-human and human alike. Perhaps the time has come to allow artists to get on with their research without their having constantly to account for it as a principle? Every new field or discipline needs space to be, in order for it to develop, in order for it to connect and find the position from which to speak. Although the arts have been awarded this space within academia, possibly for reasons more to do with institutional economics and politics than the desires for or belief in the possibility of providing alternative approaches to the production of knowledge, because of continuing, intrinsic, perceptual tensions it has not been able to settle in its place. Perhaps this is not surprising, considering the critical nature of art and its need to challenge conventions and institutions, including those that may sometimes appear to host an art practice or activity. Debates on its place within academia have, for some, been unsettling as they have found themselves in a highly textual environment in which they are by default, rendered voiceless.

Artist and researcher

I position my own work as collaborative, relational, and research- based. In the late 1990s, I made a conscious decision to change my practice and find ways of making the processes of development more part of the artwork itself. At the time I was looking for a way to make the artistic process a learning process, which would feed my own needs for making sense of things. I wanted to enter into or interfere in the process of art making so I took control over and responsibility for the production. I felt that in this way I was making a step to a more sustainable practice in that I was no longer treating my resource as indistinguishable from my own personal experience. Despite taking control in this way, I still rely heavily on intuition and I welcome unexpected discoveries during the process of researching and making, but as there is transparency in the concept of enquiry these (intuition and discovery) allow for an expansion in my own production of knowledge. In the processes of exhibiting my artwork and/or research, the acquisition of knowledge/discovery is moved from the personal to the public in the context of a wider enquiry. I mentioned before that I define my practice as ‘’relational” and it is in these networks of relations that a space is created for a production of knowledge existing outside of the self. This I have seen happening when my art projects have instigated change and/or been a catalyst for new discoveries within the institutions that I have worked with. What happens to the production of knowledge when the artwork engages or is engaged with by a member of the audience is hard to measure. However, in acknowledgement of what I see as an unbroken line between development and effect, I involve different “audiences” at every stage of development and exposition. During exhibitions, for instance, I strive to make an instrument of the work in order to prompt public discourse during gallery seminars or mini conferences.

Related concepts and terminologies Through our art projects we (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson) explore specific relations and unusual circumstances, be it “natural” or “cultural”, and how these continually generate new hybrids and material conditions in turn leading to new hybrid assemblages and resonance. In this respect, by giving preferential treatment to the particular and even possibly what might be deemed deviant or aberrant, we fly in the face of the scientific imperative towards the generic, typical and reliable. The findings of such research-based art practice has been proven to further a new shift in perspectives beyond art and into other models of practice (in our case e.g. museology, animal studies, human geography) granted by the very methodologies and processes of artistic development specific to it. Such a practice as we maintain has the additional potential to contribute to an understanding of how non-linguistic beings might navigate and construct their knowledge of the world and in turn bringing such sensibility in order to challenge and critique our unthinking dependency on words and our other representations. Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir

A Respectful Distance: To Better Conversation

On our arrival at Húsey for the filming of the preparation for the 2008 seal hunt, we were introduced to Silli, a young seal pup that had been found abandoned on the seashore. The farmer, Örn Þorleifsson told us that abandoned pups in the wild are subject to a cruel fate; skuas and gulls will attack, typically unravelling and pecking their umbilical cord and plucking out their eyes. The care these pups need to survive without their mothers is substantial, as they must be fed every four hours with a specially made mixture to match the mother’s milk. The feeding was done either by Örn or his wife. The procedure was that approximately 20 cm of soft plastic tube attached to a plastic bottle was pushed down Silli’s throat and the milk mixture pumped into his stomach. Afterwards he would be patted and cuddled to help him burp. During the day Silli would be around the place, often in close proximity to humans, but in the evening he would be lifted into the back of an old Land Rover where he had a bed made out of newspapers. At the time of our visit, Silli was approximately five weeks old and it was expected he would stay at the farm until 12–15 weeks old, or until mid-to-late August, when he would be taken to the seashore close to where he was found and allowed to go free. In the interim between our visit and him being released, there would still be a lot of care involved in looking after him. There is a transitional process necessary to take him from fluids to solid food (herring and/or capelin) and involving his learning to catch fish by himself. All these tasks were overseen by Örn, who even puts on his waders to accompany the seal when he is first introduced to swimming in the local pond. Silli happened to be male, and once free, should he survive the winter, would be likely to come back to this area year after year. Had the pup been female, she would return to give birth to pups that might well be caught in the nets laid by the farmer at Húsey the following year.

 Having been made aware of the curiosity of seals and their apparent preference for bright colors, aperformative video work developed which we titled Three Attempts (2009). This work became a crucial component of our (Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson) installation between you and me. The work shows Bryndís kneeling down at the seashore overlooking an estuary with her back to the camera. Our preliminary research had revealed that it was common for hunters to imitate seal sounds when trying to entice the seal pups away from the cow, suggesting that seals were sensitive to certain types of sound or sound frequencies at least. In the initial video performance, a variety of vocal sounds was used, from singing to the imitation of mobile phone ringtones. Initial attempts prompted little in the way of ‘reciprocation’ on the part of the seals and nothing very much altered at all in their behaviour. The technical reasons why the work came to be remade are not in themselves important for this text, but rather the fact that they necessitated another visit, which resulted in giving us more than the remake we planned, to the extent that it became a completely new work. We are very much aware of the difficulties in attempting to remake works and it is something we generally try to avoid. Nevertheless the location was the same, as was the time of year – the same clothing was worn and we even began at the same time of day. Even the weather was similar. The only thing that seemed beyond our control that day was the behaviour of the non-human animals in the water – and sure enough, their response confounded our expectations. From the moment we arrived on the shore to set up the equipment, the seals made an appearance, popping up from the water, looking, playing, diving and reappearing. The ‘control’ had shifted from us to them – it was their game now.

Our initial reaction was a sense of despair but slowly and convincingly it dawned on us that the only appropriate response was to be ‘with’ the seals in this moment. The performer soon relaxed into the role of the one being looked at, whilst visualizing the image being recorded in the rolling video camera behind – the back of a seated human being on black sand at the shore, the rippling, bright water revealing numerous dark heads popping in and out of view, against a backdrop of distant snow-topped mountains. The process of making this work is described here in order to draw attention to the requisite states of vulnerability and surrender necessary for its execution. This vulnerability is manifest in an image taken in a natural environment, of a lone figure with his/her back to ‘the watching world’. A sense of apprehension experienced by the artist is conveyed in the tentative approach of her performance. The unpredictable behaviour of the participant animals required an acceptance of the relinquishment of human control in this instance, and indeed its desirability.

Three Attempts is the embodiment of a number of principles underpinning our work and its functionality. From one perspective the work seems a novelty – its charm we’ve observed to be infectious and disarming. From another it touches on the absurd – it echoes with pathos and even melancholy. It’s difficult to see the work without acknowledging a degree of sentimentality but in common with absurdity and vulnerability the automatic rejection of sentiment is a cultured, negative response based on the desirability of strength through the application of intellect. At this juncture, we ask what if intellect alone is not enough for us to understand our new and challenged position in the world? Indeed, what if the rationality of our approach obscures or limits the possibilities of wider understanding? All the readings mentioned above are indeed embedded in the work and yet just as crucially, they serve to cohere, fuel and extend another more fundamental reading – that ‘landscape’, if it is to mean anything in the future, must cease to be an objectifying term, which denotes something to be looked at or used whilst simultaneously functioning as a register of our detachment from it. Just as we increasingly understand that other animals are specifically such in relation to the constitution of their dwelling, so we must recognize our own interdependence with habitat and the danger that by sustaining our unfettered and exploitative use of ‘resources’, including land and ‘animal others’, we resolutely keep our backs turned against the illuminating and rewarding conversation we might otherwise have.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson

August 2012.

 

Feral Attraction: Art, Becoming and Erasure,

Feral Attraction: Art, Becoming and Erasure Foreword Foreword In the summer of 1999 we (Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson) undertook a nine-day hike in Hornstrandir, an uninhabited and remote coastal area in the far north of Iceland. It was July and at that time of year, in that region there is 24-hour daylight. Remarkably however, for virtually the entire hike, we were submersed in a shroud of dense mist. Consequently, despite the general light, for over a week we were unable to see much beyond a few paces, either back from where we had walked, or ahead in the direction we were going. At the time, paradoxically, this had been a heady experience close to epiphanic in its effect. Where the physical activity of walking in ‘wild’ landscape for that length of time is normally associated with retinal reward, with ‘views’ to draw the eye into a distancing and objectifying relationship with the terrain and away from the immediacy of bodily locus, in this case, because of the mist, our attention was entirely held in an enforced myopia. Unable to draw upon the reassuring and conceptual certainties of a commanding view and so (dis)placed beyond the controlling apparatus of representation we were cast instead into the stumbling blindness of uncertainty, of indeterminacy, instinct, intuition, of saving our skin – in short, into the awkwardnesses of close terrain negotiation, survival and most significant of all – into the ontology of ‘the moment’. Though revelatory, it was so in ways we could not easily express. We discussed it as a form of cerebral locking-in, where the deprivation of seeing either forward or back left us in a state of temporal suspension. The terrain remained to be negotiated, (we were driven with increasing anxiety by the imperative of an arranged rendezvous with a boat many miles south of our starting point) but this necessitated navigational means, which were suddenly and lastingly bereft of the faculty of vision. Like most people, we have experienced conditions of uncertainty and fear many times but this was altogether more all consuming and immersive. Simultaneously and crucially it must be said, it was also exhilarating. The point of this is as a reference from which to suggest that there are other ways (involving the relinquishment of control) of experiencing and understanding the world beyond what is deliverable to us by means of language, semiotics and whatever means we customarily deploy in order to control. The story touches on ideas relating to the familiar and unfamiliar in the landscape. It turns the attention to methods we might use when confronted with the unknown, in order to soothe and calm anxiety and to populate our perceptual world instead with representations stripped of threat. It is no exaggeration to see the fear that prompts us to protect ourselves as being a key driver behind the acquisition of knowledge. The need to bring everything into the realm of what is understood and ‘known’, has led us to cut ourselves adrift from things which otherwise would tax us. But the reductionism implicit in this process has without doubt left us impoverished in other ways. Our insulation from environments beyond our urban or agrarian control has robbed us in turn of the know-how of how to be, not just ‘in’ the world, but ‘with’ the world. In the context of this chapter, what we propose is that the attraction of a feral condition lies in contradictory feelings provoked in us, in a disruption of order and an escape from what is known, named or contained. It turns things upside down and calls into question the otherwise indisputable. It speaks of the intentionality of ’things’ and like the arrival of sudden, heavy snow in the city, reminds us that things remain beyond human control. The condition that the feral state stirs in us, between uncertainty and exhilaration, or more practically between a sense of inconvenience or the opportunity to see things anew, is its compelling attraction. Introduction Feral Attraction explores the disconnection between empiricism and cultural determinacy and consider the effects of cultural blindfolding in a context of environmental fatalism. The project focuses on the site of the Vestfjords, a remote area in the North West of Iceland, which became the theatre for the enactment of urban/rural ideological tensions and ultimately, a frenetic and awkward resolution involving the herding and eventual eradication of a community of feral animals. The Vestfjords is an environment, which during the twentieth century has been increasingly host to controversy surrounding the inexorable population drain from a rural to urban way of life involving two gradual processes. One was the migration of people from farming regions into coastal towns (including Reykjavík) and the abandonment of farms in large parts of the Vestfjords. The second was the persistent out-migration from the region as a whole, including its coastal towns, both small and large. The herding narrative that follows in some way mirrors the management of remote farming families and small communities, the continuing presence of which came to be considered from an administrative perspective, to be an unsustainable drain on the wider National project. Our art research project focuses on the significance of imagery in the story and on the particular resonance of visual information in the accumulation and instrumentalisation of knowledge as the events unfolded. Feral Attraction examines the particular incident in which, a flock of feral sheep, resident for several decades on the remote mountain peninsula of Tálkni in Iceland, was finally and with great difficulty rounded up in order to satisfy agricultural protocols and the legal subordination of farmed animals in Iceland. As recently as the 1920s, although not strictly considered good farming, it was not unusual in Iceland to keep sheep out and grazing through the winter months – a custom known in Icelandic as ‘útigangur’. For a number of reasons including the increased capability for haymaking through mechanization and the need to address widespread land degradation and soil erosion, during the twentieth century the practice fell increasingly out of favour. Anyone now who allows the sheep to overwinter in the mountains not only transgresses what is thought of as good practice, but indeed is in breach of the law itself. What began as a way of exercising more control over stock eventually came to affect perceptions of the animal itself and its relationship to its environment of over a thousand years. This was signified by a reduced estimation of its capacity to survive in its adoptive land and a concomitant increase therefore in the assumed responsibilities of its keepers. As artists, our enquiry engages with environmental and relational discourse and so a scrutiny of the representation of others and other species is central to our work. In an earlier art project, nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2001-6) , concerned with the killing and capture of polar bears by British expeditions over the last two hundred years, we mapped a transition in the culturing of a ‘wild’ phenomenon. In Feral Attraction we follow in reverse, the passage of the Tálkni sheep, from farmed to feral beings, acknowledging their independent survival in a wild landscape. In respect of both transitions (polar bear or sheep) the association with man anticipates a fatality, veiled in a representational transformation. Amongst other intentions, our work critiques the still prevalent primacy of human interests and environmental exceptionalism together with the apparent impossibility of humankind to divorce itself from its solipsistic regard to self-survival, both practically and theoretically. Instead we lean towards a relational and ecological paradigm in which the species Homo sapiens is accepted as merely a player amongst a multitude of players. Through Icelandic history the polar bear has been an occasional visitor to the island shores; folklore has generally recorded horrific accounts from these meetings . Far from seeking to underestimate the danger of polar bears under these circumstances, we want to take a step back to reflect and consider alternative and what we consider more measured and inquisitive approaches and behaviour towards the ‘aberration’ of unexpected arrivals and migrations in the landscape. In Svalbard, a territory in which the encounters between polar bear and man are frequent, legal constraints are in place, to avoid polar bear deaths whenever possible. The right of the indigenous animal to this landscape, which the Spitzbergen human community has come also partly to occupy, is paramount, instilling and reflecting a different sense of respect and environmental order. Whilst on an artists’ residency in Longyearbyen, Svalbard in 2010, the local radio reported a group of tourists in crisis; a polar bear had shown up around their camp and was not responding to air rifles, flares and other customary measures used to scare bears away. But instead of tranquilizing the animal and airlifting it to a new location, as might normally be the case, the ombudsman/sysselman ordered that the tourists instead be relocated by helicopter. In respect of these examples on Svalbard and Tálkni, the potency of the encounter between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ signals complexity in the perceived constitution of environmental order and protocols. Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2000), in her reflections on her experience of being attacked and nearly killed by a crocodile in the East Alligator Lagoon in Kakadu, northern Australia, highlighted a significant ethical perspective by recording her determination that contrary to the normal response following such attacks, the animal in question should not be hunted down and killed, believing herself to be an intruder into its territory. In taxonomic and other human systems designed to underpin the human position in relation to other beings, the differences between a crocodile, a polar bear and a sheep are clear. But what can be compared usefully is our approach and attitude here to any species testing the margins of what we consider to be ‘our’ territory. In our inability to adjust to the signals of environmental threat (a condition sustained by such anthropocentrism), it is and will remain impossible to distinguish or redraw our taxonomic biases of significance. Dust, plants, animals, minerals, biomass, particles, waves, oxygen, cold, densities are oceanic in their combined effects and mutuality. In this light, importance may not be measured in their apparent individuality, nor indeed in their ‘human significance’, but in their infinitely complex behavioural associations and interactions. Historical context There is a history to ‘feral’ sheep being on Tálkni. The flock initially came from a farm called Lambeyri, whose owner, due to personal circumstances, is thought not to have been managing his sheep strictly in accordance with the law. In the early 1970s he stopped farming, leaving the farm to his family. They chose to keep the house and the land, but did not wish to keep farm animals. It is understood that by that time, the remaining sheep at the farm had already taken to the mountain. In accordance with Icelandic law, landowners of registered farmland have a duty to contribute to herding sheep generally in their district. In the Vestfjords this involves negotiating the many steep mountains characterizing this landscape. It is a dangerous job, requiring detailed knowledge of the area as well as substantial agility and fitness. The first officially recorded and acknowledged existence of the sheep in Tálkni was in 1984, when there was an outbreak in Iceland of the neurodegenerative disease scrapie (‘riða’ in Icelandic). At the time it was thought that between forty and sixty sheep were on the mountain. An argument concerning the presence, or otherwise, of the disease ensued between local farmers and the Chief Veterinary Officer. The farmers wanted proof that the disease was in their area before agreeing to cull their sheep. The veterinary officer was unable to provide such evidence, but pointed to the unregulated sheep on Tálkni as being amongst those that might have crossed the district borders in question and so were possible carriers of the disease. In the end, the Chief Veterinary Officer ordered these sheep to be culled. To fulfill the task, he called on a special division of the Icelandic Coastal Guard known as the ‘Viking Squad’ to shoot the sheep on the mountain from a helicopter. This was something at which this special squad was not expert. To make matters worse, the expedition hit bad weather, resulting in it having to be aborted, leaving some sheep dead but many more badly wounded. A few days later, when the weather had calmed down, the local rescue team then went over to the mountain and found, as reported by Lilja Magnúsdóttir when we interviewed her in Reykjavík on 25th of June 2010 “thirty sheep either dead or dying”. In respect of these animals, the team had no choice but to finish what had been started. They also took photographs at the scene, which locals would reference in support of their opposition to further remote directives of the Chief Veterinary Officer back in Reykjavik. This visual evidence prompted two consequences; it helped constitute an identity for the remaining flock of sheep as ‘Tálknafé’ (Tálkni-sheep) and it galvanized the identity of the local farmers, affirming the division between themselves and the authorities based in the Capital. Twenty-five years later, in October 2009, news came that the flock of feral sheep on Tálkni had once more been targeted, but on this occasion they had been herded from the mountain and slaughtered. As the story of their capture unfolded through the media, it revealed a fascinating tale of human dominion. A group of the best herders (‘smalar’) of the area, together with their sheepdogs, had risked their lives in climbing the mountain to retrieve the sheep. The adventure was undertaken by order from the chief legislative officer in the area. The consequence was that from a flock of twenty-five, fourteen sheep were captured alive, five perished as they fell from the cliffs in their attempts to avoid capture and six managed to escape. The fourteen captive sheep were loaded on board a boat that had brought the herders to the mountain and taken to the nearby town of Patreksfjord where they were immediately slaughtered. In addition to the ewes there were four rams and retrieved from the other side of the mountain, three yearling rams. The six remaining sheep, two rams, three ewes and one ewe lamb were retrieved a few months later in January 2010, thus ending for the time being at least, the existence of sheep on Tálkni. Art and Relationality The story caused considerable controversy in Iceland at the time, and for some, provided a new focus for environmental concerns. In order to find out more, we visited the Tálkni area in the summer of 2010, together with Dr. Karl Benediktsson, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Iceland and Unndór Jónsson, an independent artist and researcher and recorded a series of interviews with people who’d been connected to the events. We gathered images, documentation and other material along the way. On location we interviewed; Ásgeir Jónsson, Ásgeir Sveinsson, Þröstur Reynisson, Sveinn Eyjólfur Tryggvason and Ragnar Jörundsson and on our return to Reykjavík, we interviewed Lilja Magnúsdóttir another local inhabitant temporarily residing in Reykjavík as well as previous Chief Veterinary Officer Dr. Sigurður Sigurðarson, and Dr. Ólafur Dýrmundsson, whose specialism is the Icelandic sheep, and who works for the Icelandic Farmers’ Association. Ásgeir Jónsson is a member of the local council, who had also for some years been responsible for organising the autumn roundups of sheep. His role was important, but complicated, in that for many years he had turned a blind eye to the sheep being on the mountain. Due to his official capacity, when the court order came, he was forced to take part in the clearance. He also had valuable information for this project in that due to a recent minor accident he was stationed back in the boat to receive the animals during the herding, which meant that he had physical contact with each sheep captured. Ásgeir Sveinsson, a sheep farmer, who lives and farms with his brother and elderly father. At the time of interview he had a flock of 800 sheep. He has a reputation as an excellent ‘fjármaður’ (shepherd) and is the owner of exceptionally well-trained sheepdogs. Ásgeir’s interview provided a detailed description of the sheep’s unique behaviour and their unusual reaction to humans and dogs. He is very knowledgeable about sheep breeding and is the proud keeper of the only remaining known descendant of the sheep from Tálkni. This ewe was the progeny of a sheep that had escaped to Tálkni but which he had managed to herd back from the flock. His description of the characteristics of this animal was of further interest. He told us that in spring, when released, she heads to the top of the nearest local mountain and spends the summer there, apparently alone. Þröstur Reynisson took part in the herding as an employee of the town council and the owner of a good dog, prepared to stand its ground. His role was to be at the foot of the mountain with his dog to stop the sheep escaping along the beach. He talked about the wariness of the flock, reasoning that from time to time the sheep had been shot at by locals, some for target practice and by others for meat. Sveinn Eyjólfur Tryggvason was recruited by the governor of the local council and had been put in charge of the herding operation. He selected the men who went on this trip. In the interview he discussed the different characteristics of this flock and why the dogs did not work as they might in other sheep herding exercises. He did not consider it unusual that some sheep fell from the cliffs, as it is behaviourally characteristic of sheep when cornered on a mountain. He talked from the perspective of animal welfare and observed that the flock would have been much larger had it been kept in the right conditions. He mentioned that only one sheep of the nineteen caught, had been earmarked, as all farmed sheep are. This animal had been on Tálkni for four years, indicating that it had chosen to join the feral flock. In our interview with Ragnar Jörundsson, the governor of the municipality of Vesturbyggð, to which the village of Patreksfjörður (Patreksfjord) belongs, he talked about the police involvement and how the local council established jurisdiction to clear the area of sheep. He discussed the division between the local people and city dwellers “who don’t know anything about sheep”. He also accused the media of reporting the incidents in a particularly frenzied way in order to stir up opposition, deeming their reportage to be misinformed. He talked about the responsibilities of the district council towards sheep that are unclaimed and therefore ‘in need’. These sheep by default belong to the council. He said the council takes advice from the Chief Veterinary Office and the Farmers Union and that both thought it best to clear the sheep of the area. Lilja Magnúsdóttir was born and raised at the farm opposite Tálkni. She was part of the first serious attempt of gathering the Tálkni sheep, which took place in 1992. She is interested in the breeding of Icelandic sheep and described the physical appearance of the sheep both as livestock and as meat during and after the 1992 gathering. In our interview her description concerned the particular shape of the feet, observing them to have been higher and thicker than in normal sheep. She also described their body as being longer and more slender. As produce she described the location of fat as being in the muscles themselves and under the skin, whereas in the farmed Icelandic sheep the fat is around the abdomen. She proposed that such sheep would not have survived, as they would too easily have been caught up with and trapped in the heavy snow. Her theory concerns ‘natural selection’ as she calls it – saying that the sheep originating from the Lambeyri stock – the ones that were ‘abandoned’ as it were when the farm closed – were more suited to the landscape and the weather and that this was the reason the majority of the flock looked as it did, despite newer additions. Ólafur Dýrmundsson’s comments were from what he considers the perspective of animal welfare. He put forward various reasons why sheep are not able to take care of themselves. He pointed out that one out of every four sheep taken in 2009-10 were from other farms around the area. Despite that, he acknowledged that the majority was of a colour no longer prominent in Icelandic sheep. He says that this had caused difficulties for the coast guard elite squad when attempting to shoot them from the helicopter, because the colour blends with the landscape – making the animals difficult to see. He went on to say that this colour is the dominant outcome when mixing with white and that the presence of a flock of sheep in Tálkni would always encourage other sheep to join the group, it being such a difficult area to herd. In this respect he was sympathetic with farmers at not being able to go after them. While, he denied there being any such thing as ‘feral sheep’, he estimated that of 470,000 sheep in Iceland, approximately 500 are not accounted for. Jón Þórðarson was one of the owners of the surrounding land closest to Tálkni. He was against the herding of the sheep, wanting instead to keep them on the mountain. At the time of our visit he was living in the nearby town of Bíldudalur and from there he runs a tourist and fishing business together with guesthouse and art gallery/residency. His idea was that they could have become a tourist attraction. He tried to stop the sheep being herded by declaring them to be on his land; however by law, in order for this to be acknowledged, he would have had to build shelters for them on the site and so his claim was dismissed. From the beginning of our research in Iceland, the role of the image was of great importance. Images were crucial in cementing the identity of the sheep as a ‘special flock’ by their unique appearance on the one hand and on the other, by means of the television footage documenting their attempts to escape capture on this inhospitable mountain. This footage, stood in contrast and conflicted with an image of domesticated, living produce destined for the slaughter and consumption normally associated with ‘réttir’, the autumnal roundup. In the imaginations of many who protested from near and far, these sheep instead were independent beings of note, deserving of their right to live out their lives. The imaged embodiment of the animal in an effectively non-human landscape seems to challenge the scope of human representation by means of a paradigm shift. In its apparent self-determination, the animal in question can be seen to have grown into ‘its larger self’ through its adoption of this landscape as a permanent home beyond human accessibility and control. The (albeit perhaps reluctant) acceptance of this by locals in the surrounding area for so long, eventually in itself became a bone of contention prompting the central government office to make demands for the flock to be recovered. In further comparison between the polar bear and the Tálkni sheep in the context of the Icelandic landscape, it has always been deemed necessary to kill the polar bears arriving in the country, because the Icelandic wilderness is considered not to be their natural environment. As a non-native species and a carnivore, the polar bear is considered a danger to other Icelandic beings and impossible to contain humanely and securely. The Tálkni sheep on the other hand did not threaten anyone or anything. The land they occupied was not managed, occupied or indeed coveted by anyone else. In fact, the family who owned Tálkni was quite comfortable with the flock of sheep remaining there. This however raised the legal necessity to erect houses for their shelter and upkeep – itself, an impossible task, considering the nature of the land and its limited accessibility. Paradoxically, this would in turn have undermined the independence of the flock and therefore defeated the purpose of any armistice. There are different ways of interpreting what happened on the mountain the day the flock was herded, leaving five sheep dead and six still at liberty. There are many questions to be asked regarding animal consciousness – whether for instance that in the context of new circumstances, jumping from a cliff is indicative of the exercising of choice. There are the complicated distinctions to be made between what is seen as a ‘noble’ and an ‘ignoble’ killing – the affront to the many Icelanders who protested was triggered by what was seen to be a bungled and, as a consequence, inhumane, exercise of shepherding. Was this perhaps an unconscious conflation of the idealized concepts of tidiness and seamless erasure? When humans slaughter animals, their imposed departure is one of transformation, not normally regarded as one of eradication. In order to preserve a sense of vital continuity, within Western culture, particularly Anglo-American, it has been a characteristic that insofar as we are eaters of animal flesh we focus on meat as opposed to the extinguishing of life that such consumption necessitates. This death is a byproduct of our desire to eat, but its visibility has been discreetly minimized in deference to this more culturally palatable focus of attention. Everywhere in the story, and not least in our interviews, there are contradictory perspectives and conflicting ideals. There is the unquestioning belief by some in the need for adherence to existing legislation. There are environmental perspectives; those based on animal rights; and there are matters of professional and moral pride and the desire of farmers, to be seen to be ‘taking care’ of the animals in their charge. Exposition and process From an early stage in the examination of this story and in the research material we accumulated, we stumbled again and again on the claim that something odd had happened to the sheep during their time on Tálkni. In the media, in popular accounts, and in the interviews we conducted with those on the ground, there is repeated mention of an adaptation in the sheep’s physiology. A natural, adaptive, even evolutionary process had occurred, due apparently to their constant negotiation of this demanding mountainous terrain. This adaptive response to the topographic constitution of the landscape that ensured their relative isolation and insulation from humans for so long, seems to have been most conspicuous in a lengthening of their legs. But in the absence of concrete evidence, how is this ever to be tested? In art, there is often more significance in one identifiable and well-articulated detail than can be relayed in a wealth of information, particularly where such a detail exposes a flaw, a fluctuation, or break in the rhythm of cultural (and human-specific) affairs. Relationality is key to our artworks and projects. It is reflected in the research process by which we seek to gather information and evidence through contact with individuals and organisations concerned. These meetings are often recorded or documented through photography, video or audio and are often pivotal in influencing the structure and the development of an artwork. The biggest significance of this story is in the exposure of the insecurities of ‘expert’ culture. Those who felt they should have power felt their power usurped. In managing the evidence (the disposal of the flock and subsequently of the carcasses and bones), the community of experts involved, reduced the physical signs by which the history of this event (this nomadic becoming) could be remembered or told. In the absence of relics and data, all fact and fiction is conflated, all borders between them are blurred and therefore subject, potentially, to wholesale dismissal as myth. But by ascribing greater significance to materiality and ensuring its strategic absence, the perpetrators of this act perhaps underestimated the ripple effect of that removal – into every void, the imagination will pour its will or its questions. Without the hard evidence to provide a satisfactory backstop to such suspicion, the impertinence of the questions is always likely to exceed what facts alone might have tempered or quelled. In this work, the value of the leg and its transformation pertains to its role in the extruded and extruding process of liberation – the sheep remained out and over time became better capable of being so by a process of adaptive response to the environment. The symbolic driver – in representational terms is in a retrieved relic – even (by necessity) a faked relic, designed and made in order to give value to something observed but allowed neither to survive nor be measured and corroborated by instruments of science. For this artwork, the bone is extended in correspondence with the lengthening of the legs as was reported by some observers of the sheep. The gap of significance, is bridged by a hoop of silver, a material we accept culturally as being ‘of value’. The human representation and symbolic conferral of importance may even be seen as a compromise here, in deference to the semiotics of a culture that often fails to recognize intrinsic value. Here, silver gives presence to the missing, valuable, phenomenological and symbolic apparent ‘effect’. It signifies the change that is intrinsic to a) a period of time, b) a specific location c) the transitional condition of ‘becoming’ and in addition, both d) a theft and e) a possible conspiracy where all evidence of the flock and its bodily remains was eradicated deliberately, before biologists (for example) had the chance to examine them. Broadly it is the embodiment of difference – in opinions and of the contested claim that the sheep adapted as a consequence of having become feral. As there was no opportunity for scientific study to be conducted on the flock before or after slaughter, we mark a space in which this extension hovers between being a memorial and a relational corollary of being feral in a mountainous landscape. With this intervention, we keep alive the story of a community of domestic animals, which despite climatic inclemency and the seeming impenetrability of this landscape, survived without human care for three decades and indeed showed every sign that they might have continued to live there in perpetuity. After-lives The flawed nature of this enterprise, that is the inefficient and messy nature of the herding of the Tálkni sheep, had a retrospective after-effect, calling into question the validity of the enterprise itself. The very representational tropes which ennoble human agrarian enterprise, for example the promotion of efficiency in the management of land and animals of the kind implicit in historical paintings, (Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr & Mrs Andrews, Paul Potter’s Bull, and innumerable 17th Century livestock paintings), throw the dubious nature of the reclamation of the herd into sharp relief. Whilst involving a starkly different kind of relationship to our ‘landscape others’ there are parallels also to be drawn (and they have been described above in this text) between the controversy and contradictions embodied in this episode and those prompted by what has become an intermittent but recurrent phenomenon in northern Iceland – the arrival of ‘stray’ polar bears. Tidiness and order is threatened by the presence of the feral animal on the one hand and the appearance of the exhausted and dangerous alien wild animal on the other. Rather than engaging with complexity and being open to the opportunities it may offer, the default position of local and national governmental authorities seems to be to excise the agent that would test its borders, thereby allowing the maintenance of the status quo. The resultant human fault-line seems to run between two ideologies – a national, establishment view on one hand, in which the integrity of Icelandic farming (and perhaps culture) is an imperative. On the other, there is a growing lobby of those whose interests can perhaps be said to be less locally rooted and who are able at this point to exercise little direct power, but whose collective voice increasingly coheres around environmental ideas extending far beyond nationhood. In another art project from 2010 entitled, Uncertainty in the City, we explored the idea of contested ‘human’ environments with specific relation to the presence of other species. The project hinged on an (albeit unwritten) assumption of neutral interspecific claim to territory and we conducted interviews with hundreds of participants in relation to their encounters with animals within and around the margins of their home. Along with an invitation to retell their stories we invited them to consider ideas of ownership, colonization and encroachment in this context. Given the space to objectify the experiences there was surprising openness towards questioning the rationality of their responses and to confront the emotional inconsistencies within such experience. The garden – a piece of land we suggested was a surrogate, albeit altered tract of ‘nature’ – is a kind of cultural epidermis by which tolerances and affections for others moving through, were tested and analyzed. In this project and more widely we use aberrant exemplars to challenge accepted behavioural and cultural tropes. In the Uncertainty project, non-human encroachment on human systems was often, although not always, viewed as a negative occurrence. Typical cases were the presence of ants for instance around the door to a house – the margins of tolerance were drawn in relation to the proximity to threshold or perceived infringement either towards or across that line. Urban foxes and seagulls are amongst the most consistently contested species and their presence is alternately construed as pleasant, desirable or offensive, according to the experience and/or conditioning of the humans concerned. In the case of the Tálkni sheep, however, the migration away from the human, in giving further dimensionality to the phenomenon of human/nonhuman entanglements, reminds us that our presence is neither necessarily crucial nor desirable for most species, even ones we’ve domesticated and trained to be reliant upon us. The feral flock was a thorn in the side of the agricultural community – not necessarily those in the local area in question, but more starkly and tellingly, from a remote, central-administrative perspective. But in the resistance of something, particularly an entity that is normally attributed with little self-determination, as artists we see something much more interesting, in that it breaks the mould of our expectations – it draws our attention. The expression and enactment of capabilities beyond what we are given to believe is expected, forces us to re-examine our perception of that thing, and our initial reasoning for arriving at such a perspective. Did we believe we had modified the behaviour and capacities of the domestic sheep to the extent that it had indeed become an unreconstructed model of our projected will upon it? Just as we might enjoy the frisson of being lost when we believe that it is a temporary condition, so too do we find fascinating the idea that our constructed world-view is in some way destabilized by the will of another. In the same way therefore, when such aberrant behaviour is suppressed, there is a sense that an injustice is done. Something, which appeared to us to offer a new perspective – rather than being acknowledged and valued, preserved and observed – is eliminated purely in order that the status quo is restored and the behaviour-model is reaffirmed. Such action is based on an anthro-utilitarian approach that sees adaption or evolution within systems we have engineered around other adopted organisms as running counter to our interests and therefore undesirable. Simultaneously of course the phenomenon exposes the mythic projections we deploy in order to uphold our utilitarian requirements: if an organism is useful for this and that, then anything – any capacity, behaviour or inclination that does not support that function-set – may, if noticed, be deemed undesirable and may be subject to extirpation. This thinking is the basis of intensive breeding programmes and the kind of genetic modification that gives us for instance, hairless cats and seedless grapes. It is this single-mindedness that in modernity has caused us increasingly to consider things, places and beings in isolation. This has been to the detriment of possible developments towards a more coherent and complex world-view, which might privilege, instead, an understanding and appreciation of ecologies and the acknowledgement of material interconnectivity. There is a tension between what we hold culturally as being right and proper and what we observe as a bid by another agent to disrupt that order. At the heart of this case is something that may be dismissed by many to be trivial and inconsequential; for us, in ways resonant with those ideas proposed by Jane Bennett (2010) in her book Vibrant Matter, it serves as a vital pointer to expose how human systems suppress the inclinations and capabilities of ‘things’, seeing instead only what we have designated for them. We have a tendency to blind ourselves to the wills of those outside our systems whose actions do not correspond with, or seem at odds with, our own – who are simply not compliant in the human enterprise at hand. When the animal agent is one with which we technically coexist, (a domestic animal) the oversight seems particularly acute. A lack of porosity is evident – a resistance to ideas or indicators of change – a reactionary dismissal of knowledge concerning environment and the adaptability of denizens – the shaping of existence by environment – the capacity of discrete environments to model not only new biological permutations but to spawn new behavioural possibilities as a consequence of introductions or migration – a failure on our part still to acknowledge that a condition of ‘becoming’ is actually the norm – in nature, stability and material independence are illusionary. Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson May 2013 Acknowledgements: Professor Karl Benediktson for his assistance and support of this research. Unndór Jónsson for transcription of interviews and research assistance. References: Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things. Durham, Duke University Press. Plumwood, V. (2000) Being Prey in J. O’Reilly, S. O’Reilly, and R. Sterling (eds), The Ultimate Journey, Berkeley, CA Magnúsdóttir, L. Interviewed by: Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. Reykjavík, 25th June 2010 Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. (2006) nanoq: flat out and bluesome, London, Black Dog Publishing Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. (2010) Uncertainty in the City. Berlin, The Green Box

Feral Attraction: Art, Becoming and Erasure

 Foreword

 In the summer of 1999 we (Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson) undertook a nine-day hike in Hornstrandir, an uninhabited and remote coastal area in the far north of Iceland. It was July and at that time of year, in that region there is 24-hour daylight. Remarkably however, for virtually the entire hike, we were submersed in a shroud of dense mist. Consequently, despite the general light, for over a week we were unable to see much beyond a few paces, either back from where we had walked, or ahead in the direction we were going. At the time, paradoxically, this had been a heady experience close to epiphanic in its effect. Where the physical activity of walking in ‘wild’ landscape for that length of time is normally associated with retinal reward, with ‘views’ to draw the eye into a distancing and objectifying relationship with the terrain and away from the immediacy of bodily locus, in this case, because of the mist, our attention was entirely held in an enforced myopia. Unable to draw upon the reassuring and conceptual certainties of a commanding view and so (dis)placed beyond the controlling apparatus of representation we were cast instead into the stumbling blindness of uncertainty, of indeterminacy, instinct, intuition, of saving our skin – in short, into the awkwardnesses of close terrain negotiation, survival and most significant of all – into the ontology of ‘the moment’.

Though revelatory, it was so in ways we could not easily express. We discussed it as a form of cerebral locking-in, where the deprivation of seeing either forward or back left us in a state of temporal suspension. The terrain remained to be negotiated, (we were driven with increasing anxiety by the imperative of an arranged rendezvous with a boat many miles south of our starting point) but this necessitated navigational means, which were suddenly and lastingly bereft of the faculty of vision. Like most people, we have experienced conditions of uncertainty and fear many times but this was altogether more all consuming and immersive. Simultaneously and crucially it must be said, it was also exhilarating.

The point of this is as a reference from which to suggest that there are other ways (involving the relinquishment of control) of experiencing and understanding the world beyond what is deliverable to us by means of language, semiotics and whatever means we customarily deploy in order to control. The story touches on ideas relating to the familiar and unfamiliar in the landscape. It turns the attention to methods we might use when confronted with the unknown, in order to soothe and calm anxiety and to populate our perceptual world instead with representations stripped of threat. It is no exaggeration to see the fear that prompts us to protect ourselves as being a key driver behind the acquisition of knowledge. The need to bring everything into the realm of what is understood and ‘known’, has led us to cut ourselves adrift from things which otherwise would tax us. But the reductionism implicit in this process has without doubt left us impoverished in other ways. Our insulation from environments beyond our urban or agrarian control has robbed us in turn of the know-how of how to be, not just ‘in’ the world, but ‘with’ the world. In the context of this chapter, what we propose is that the attraction of a feral condition lies in contradictory feelings provoked in us, in a disruption of order and an escape from what is known, named or contained. It turns things upside down and calls into question the otherwise indisputable. It speaks of the intentionality of ’things’ and like the arrival of sudden, heavy snow in the city, reminds us that things remain beyond human control. The condition that the feral state stirs in us, between uncertainty and exhilaration, or more practically between a sense of inconvenience or the opportunity to see things anew, is its compelling attraction.

Introduction

 Feral Attraction explores the disconnection between empiricism and cultural determinacy and consider the effects of cultural blindfolding in a context of environmental fatalism. The project focuses on the site of the Vestfjords, a remote area in the North West of Iceland, which became the theatre for the enactment of urban/rural ideological tensions and ultimately, a frenetic and awkward resolution involving the herding and eventual eradication of a community of feral animals. The Vestfjords is an environment, which during the twentieth century has been increasingly host to controversy surrounding the inexorable population drain from a rural to urban way of life involving two gradual processes. One was the migration of people from farming regions into coastal towns (including Reykjavík) and the abandonment of farms in large parts of the Vestfjords. The second was the persistent out-migration from the region as a whole, including its coastal towns, both small and large. The herding narrative that follows in some way mirrors the management of remote farming families and small communities, the continuing presence of which came to be considered from an administrative perspective, to be an unsustainable drain on the wider National project. Our art research project focuses on the significance of imagery in the story and on the particular resonance of visual information in the accumulation and instrumentalisation of knowledge as the events unfolded.

Feral Attraction examines the particular incident in which, a flock of feral sheep, resident for several decades on the remote mountain peninsula of Tálkni in Iceland, was finally and with great difficulty rounded up in order to satisfy agricultural protocols and the legal subordination of farmed animals in Iceland. As recently as the 1920s, although not strictly considered good farming, it was not unusual in Iceland to keep sheep out and grazing through the winter months – a custom known in Icelandic as ‘útigangur’For a number of reasons including the increased capability for haymaking through mechanization and the need to address widespread land degradation and soil erosion, during the twentieth century the practice fell increasingly out of favour. Anyone now who allows the sheep to overwinter in the mountains not only transgresses what is thought of as good practice, but indeed is in breach of the law itself. What began as a way of exercising more control over stock eventually came to affect perceptions of the animal itself and its relationship to its environment of over a thousand years. This was signified by a reduced estimation of its capacity to survive in its adoptive land and a concomitant increase therefore in the assumed responsibilities of its keepers.

As artists, our enquiry engages with environmental and relational discourse and so a scrutiny of the representation of others and other species is central to our work. In an earlier art project, nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2001-6)[1], concerned with the killing and capture of polar bears by British expeditions over the last two hundred years, we mapped a transition in the culturing of a ‘wild’ phenomenon. In Feral Attraction we follow in reverse, the passage of the Tálkni sheep, from farmed to feral beings, acknowledging their independent survival in a wild landscape. In respect of both transitions (polar bear or sheep) the association with man anticipates a fatality, veiled in a representational transformation. Amongst other intentions, our work critiques the still prevalent primacy of human interests and environmental exceptionalism together with the apparent impossibility of humankind to divorce itself from its solipsistic regard to self-survival, both practically and theoretically. Instead we lean towards a relational and ecological paradigm in which the species Homo sapiens is accepted as merely a player amongst a multitude of players.

Through Icelandic history the polar bear has been an occasional visitor to the island shores; folklore has generally recorded horrific accounts from these meetings[2]. Far from seeking to underestimate the danger of polar bears under these circumstances, we want to take a step back to reflect and consider alternative and what we consider more measured and inquisitive approaches and behaviour towards the ‘aberration’ of unexpected arrivals and migrations in the landscape. In Svalbard, a territory in which the encounters between polar bear and man are frequent, legal constraints are in place, to avoid polar bear deaths whenever possible. The right of the indigenous animal to this landscape, which the Spitzbergen human community has come also partly to occupy, is paramount, instilling and reflecting a different sense of respect and environmental order. Whilst on an artists’ residency in Longyearbyen, Svalbard in 2010, the local radio reported a group of tourists in crisis; a polar bear had shown up around their camp and was not responding to air rifles, flares and other customary measures used to scare bears away. But instead of tranquilizing the animal and airlifting it to a new location, as might normally be the case, the ombudsman/sysselman ordered that the tourists instead be relocated by helicopter.

In respect of these examples on Svalbard and Tálkni, the potency of the encounter between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ signals complexity in the perceived constitution of environmental order and protocols. Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2000), in her reflections on her experience of being attacked and nearly killed by a crocodile in the East Alligator Lagoon in Kakadu, northern Australia, highlighted a significant ethical perspective by recording her determination that contrary to the normal response following such attacks, the animal in question should not be hunted down and killed, believing herself to be an intruder into its territory.

In taxonomic and other human systems designed to underpin the human position in relation to other beings, the differences between a crocodile, a polar bear and a sheep are clear. But what can be compared usefully is our approach and attitude here to any species testing the margins of what we consider to be ‘our’ territory. In our inability to adjust to the signals of environmental threat (a condition sustained by such anthropocentrism), it is and will remain impossible to distinguish or redraw our taxonomic biases of significance. Dust, plants, animals, minerals, biomass, particles, waves, oxygen, cold, densities are oceanic in their combined effects and mutuality. In this light, importance may not be measured in their apparent individuality, nor indeed in their ‘human significance’, but in their infinitely complex behavioural associations and interactions.

Historical context

 There is a history to ‘feral’ sheep being on Tálkni. The flock initially came from a farm called Lambeyri, whose owner, due to personal circumstances, is thought not to have been managing his sheep strictly in accordance with the law. In the early 1970s he stopped farming, leaving the farm to his family. They chose to keep the house and the land, but did not wish to keep farm animals. It is understood that by that time, the remaining sheep at the farm had already taken to the mountain. In accordance with Icelandic law, landowners of registered farmland have a duty to contribute to herding sheep generally in their district. In the Vestfjords this involves negotiating the many steep mountains characterizing this landscape. It is a dangerous job, requiring detailed knowledge of the area as well as substantial agility and fitness.

The first officially recorded and acknowledged existence of the sheep in Tálkni was in 1984, when there was an outbreak in Iceland of the neurodegenerative disease scrapie (‘riða’ in Icelandic). At the time it was thought that between forty and sixty sheep were on the mountain. An argument concerning the presence, or otherwise, of the disease ensued between local farmers and the Chief Veterinary Officer. The farmers wanted proof that the disease was in their area before agreeing to cull their sheep. The veterinary officer was unable to provide such evidence, but pointed to the unregulated sheep on Tálkni as being amongst those that might have crossed the district borders in question and so were possible carriers of the disease. In the end, the Chief Veterinary Officer ordered these sheep to be culled. To fulfill the task, he called on a special division of the Icelandic Coastal Guard known as the ‘Viking Squad’ to shoot the sheep on the mountain from a helicopter. This was something at which this special squad was not expert. To make matters worse, the expedition hit bad weather, resulting in it having to be aborted, leaving some sheep dead but many more badly wounded. A few days later, when the weather had calmed down, the local rescue team then went over to the mountain and found, as reported by Lilja Magnúsdóttir when we interviewed her in Reykjavík on 25th of June 2010 “thirty sheep either dead or dying”. In respect of these animals, the team had no choice but to finish what had been started. They also took photographs at the scene, which locals would reference in support of their opposition to further remote directives of the Chief Veterinary Officer back in Reykjavik. This visual evidence prompted two consequences; it helped constitute an identity for the remaining flock of sheep as ‘Tálknafé’ (Tálknisheep) and it galvanized the identity of the local farmers, affirming the division between themselves and the authorities based in the Capital.

Twenty-five years later, in October 2009, news came that the flock of feral sheep on Tálkni had once more been targeted, but on this occasion they had been herded from the mountain and slaughtered. As the story of their capture unfolded through the media, it revealed a fascinating tale of human dominion. A group of the best herders (‘smalar’) of the area, together with their sheepdogs, had risked their lives in climbing the mountain to retrieve the sheep. The adventure was undertaken by order from the chief legislative officer in the area. The consequence was that from a flock of twenty-five, fourteen sheep were captured alive, five perished as they fell from the cliffs in their attempts to avoid capture and six managed to escape. The fourteen captive sheep were loaded on board a boat that had brought the herders to the mountain and taken to the nearbytown ofPatreksfjord where they were immediately slaughtered. In addition to the ewes there were four rams and retrieved from the other side of the mountain, three yearling rams. The six remaining sheep, two rams, three ewes and one ewe lamb were retrieved a few months later in January 2010, thus ending for the time being at least, the existence of sheep onTálkni.

Art and Relationality

 The story caused considerable controversy in Iceland at the time, and for some, provided a new focus for environmental concerns. In order to find out more, we visited the Tálkni area in the summer of 2010, together with Dr. Karl Benediktsson, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Iceland and Unndór Jónsson, an independent artist and researcher and recorded a series of interviews with people who’d been connected to the events. We gathered images, documentation and other material along the way. On location we interviewed; Ásgeir Jónsson, Ásgeir Sveinsson, Þröstur Reynisson, Sveinn Eyjólfur Tryggvason and Ragnar Jörundsson and on our return to Reykjavík, we interviewed Lilja Magnúsdóttir another local inhabitant temporarily residing in Reykjavík as well as previous Chief Veterinary Officer Dr. Sigurður Sigurðarson, and Dr. Ólafur Dýrmundsson, whose specialism is the Icelandic sheep, and who works for the Icelandic Farmers’ Association.

Ásgeir Jónsson is a member of the local council, who had also for some years been responsible for organising the autumn roundups of sheep. His role was important, but complicated, in that for many years he had turned a blind eye to the sheep being on the mountain. Due to his official capacity, when the court order came, he was forced to take part in the clearance. He also had valuable information for this project in that due to a recent minor accident he was stationed back in the boat to receive the animals during the herding, which meant that he had physical contact with each sheep captured.

Ásgeir Sveinsson, a sheep farmer, who lives and farms with his brother and elderly father. At the time of interview he had a flock of 800 sheep. He has a reputation as an excellent ‘fjármaður’ (shepherd) and is the owner of exceptionally well-trained sheepdogs. Ásgeir’s interview provided a detailed description of the sheep’s unique behaviour and their unusual reaction to humans and dogs. He is very knowledgeable about sheep breeding and is the proud keeper of the only remaining known descendant of the sheep from Tálkni. This ewe was the progeny of a sheep that had escaped to Tálkni but which he had managed to herd back from the flock. His description of the characteristics of this animal was of further interest. He told us that in spring, when released, she heads to the top of the nearest local mountain and spends the summer there, apparently alone.

Þröstur Reynisson took part in the herding as an employee of the town council and the owner of a good dog, prepared to stand its ground. His role was to be at the foot of the mountain with his dog to stop the sheep escaping along the beach. He talked about the wariness of the flock, reasoning that from time to time the sheep had been shot at by locals, some for target practice and by others for meat.

Sveinn Eyjólfur Tryggvason was recruited by the governor of the local council and had been put in charge of the herding operation. He selected the men who went on this trip. In the interview he discussed the different characteristics of this flock and why the dogs did not work as they might in other sheep herding exercises. He did not consider it unusual that some sheep fell from the cliffs, as it is behaviourally characteristic of sheep when cornered on a mountain. He talked from the perspective of animal welfare and observed that the flock would have been much larger had it been kept in the right conditions. He mentioned that only one sheep of the nineteen caught, had been earmarked, as all farmed sheep are. This animal had been onTálkni for four years, indicating that it had chosen to join the feral flock.

In our interview with Ragnar Jörundsson, the governor of the municipality of Vesturbyggð, to which the village of Patreksfjörður (Patreksfjord) belongs, he talked about the police involvement and how the local council established jurisdiction to clear the area of sheep. He discussed the division between the local people and city dwellers “who don’t know anything about sheep”. He also accused the media of reporting the incidents in a particularly frenzied way in order to stir up opposition, deeming their reportage to be misinformed. He talked about the responsibilities of the district council towards sheep that are unclaimed and therefore ‘in need’. These sheep by default belong to the council. He said the council takes advice from the Chief Veterinary Office and the Farmers Union and that both thought it best to clear the sheep of the area.

Lilja Magnúsdóttir was born and raised at the farm opposite Tálkni. She was part of the first serious attempt of gathering the Tálkni sheep, which took place in 1992. She is interested in the breeding of Icelandic sheep and described the physical appearance of the sheep both as livestock and as meat during and after the 1992 gathering. In our interview her description concerned the particular shape of the feet, observing them to have been higher and thicker than in normal sheep. She also described their body as being longer and more slender. As produce she described the location of fat as being in the muscles themselves and under the skin, whereas in the farmed Icelandic sheep the fat is around the abdomen. She proposed that such sheep would not have survived, as they would too easily have been caught up with and trapped in the heavy snow. Her theory concerns ‘natural selection’ as she calls it – saying that the sheep originating from the Lambeyri stock – the ones that were ‘abandoned’ as it were when the farm closed – were more suited to the landscape and the weather and that this was the reason the majority of the flock looked as it did, despite newer additions.

Ólafur Dýrmundsson’s comments were from what he considers the perspective of animal welfare. He put forward various reasons why sheep are not able to take care of themselves. He pointed out that one out of every four sheep taken in 2009-10 were from other farms around the area. Despite that, he acknowledged that the majority was of a colour no longer prominent in Icelandic sheep. He says that this had caused difficulties for the coast guard elite squad when attempting to shoot them from the helicopter, because the colour blends with the landscape – making the animals difficult to see. He went on to say that this colour is the dominant outcome when mixing with white and that the presence of a flock of sheep in Tálkni would always encourage other sheep to join the group, it being such a difficult area to herd. In this respect he was sympathetic with farmers at not being able to go after them. While, he denied there being any such thing as ‘feral sheep’, he estimated that of 470,000 sheep in Iceland, approximately 500 are not accounted for.

Jón Þórðarson was one of the owners of the surrounding land closest to Tálkni. He was against the herding of the sheep, wanting instead to keep them on the mountain. At the time of our visit he was living in the nearby town of Bíldudalur and from there he runs a tourist and fishing business together with guesthouse and art gallery/residency. His idea was that they could have become a tourist attraction. He tried to stop the sheep being herded by declaring them to be on his land; however by law, in order for this to be acknowledged, he would have had to build shelters for them on the site and so his claim was dismissed.

From the beginning of our research in Iceland, the role of the image was of great importance. Images were crucial in cementing the identity of the sheep as a ‘special flock’ by their unique appearance on the one hand and on the other, by means of the television footage documenting their attempts to escape capture on this inhospitable mountain. This footage, stood in contrast and conflicted with an image of domesticated, living produce destined for the slaughter and consumption normally associated with ‘réttir’, the autumnal roundup. In the imaginations of many who protested from near and far, these sheep instead were independent beings of note, deserving of their right to live out their lives. The imaged embodiment of the animal in an effectively non-human landscape seems to challenge the scope of human representation by means of a paradigm shift. In its apparent self-determination, the animal in question can be seen to have grown into ‘its larger self’ through its adoption of this landscape as a permanent home beyond human accessibility and control. The (albeit perhaps reluctant) acceptance of this by locals in the surrounding area for so long, eventually in itself became a bone of contention prompting the central government office to make demands for the flock to be recovered.

In further comparison between the polar bear and the Tálkni sheep in the context of the Icelandic landscape, it has always been deemed necessary to kill the polar bears arriving in the country, because the Icelandic wilderness is considered not to be their natural environment. As a non-native species and a carnivore, the polar bear is considered a danger to other Icelandic beings and impossible to contain humanely and securely. The Tálkni sheep on the other hand did not threaten anyone or anything. The land they occupied was not managed, occupied or indeed coveted by anyone else. In fact, the family who owned Tálkni was quite comfortable with the flock of sheep remaining there. This however raised the legal necessity to erect houses for their shelter and upkeep – itself, an impossible task, considering the nature of the land and its limited accessibility. Paradoxically, this would in turn have undermined the independence of the flock and therefore defeated the purpose of any armistice.

There are different ways of interpreting what happened on the mountain the day the flock was herded, leaving five sheep dead and six still at liberty. There are many questions to be asked regarding animal consciousness – whether for instance that in the context of new circumstances, jumping from a cliff is indicative of the exercising of choice. There are the complicated distinctions to be made between what is seen as a ‘noble’ and an ‘ignoble’ killing – the affront to the many Icelanders who protested was triggered by what was seen to be a bungled and, as a consequence, inhumane, exercise of shepherding. Was this perhaps an unconscious conflation of the idealized concepts of tidiness and seamless erasure? When humans slaughter animals, their imposed departure is one of transformation, not normally regarded as one of eradication. In order to preserve a sense of vital continuity, within Western culture, particularly Anglo-American, it has been a characteristic that insofar as we are eaters of animal flesh we focus on meat as opposed to the extinguishing of life that such consumption necessitates. This death is a byproduct of our desire to eat, but its visibility has been discreetly minimized in deference to this more culturally palatable focus of attention. Everywhere in the story, and not least in our interviews, there are contradictory perspectives and conflicting ideals. There is the unquestioning belief by some in the need for adherence to existing legislation. There are environmental perspectives; those based on animal rights; and there are matters of professional and moral pride and the desire of farmers, to be seen to be ‘taking care’ of the animals in their charge.

Exposition and process

 From an early stage in the examination of this story and in the research material we accumulated, we stumbled again and again on the claim that something odd had happened to the sheep during their time on Tálkni. In the media, in popular accounts, and in the interviews we conducted with those on the ground, there is repeated mention of an adaptation in the sheep’s physiology. A natural, adaptive, even evolutionary process had occurred, due apparently to their constant negotiation of this demanding mountainous terrain. This adaptive response to the topographic constitution of the landscape that ensured their relative isolation and insulation from humans for so long, seems to have been most conspicuous in a lengthening of their legs. But in the absence of concrete evidence, how is this ever to be tested?

In art, there is often more significance in one identifiable and well-articulated detail than can be relayed in a wealth of information, particularly where such a detail exposes a flaw, a fluctuation, or break in the rhythm of cultural (and human-specific) affairs.Relationality is key to our artworks and projects. It is reflected in the research process by which we seek to gather information and evidence through contact with individuals and organisations concerned. These meetings are often recorded or documented through photography, video or audio and are often pivotal in influencing the structure and the development of an artwork. The biggest significance of this story is in the exposure of the insecurities of ‘expert’ culture. Those who felt they should have power felt their power usurped. In managing the evidence (the disposal of the flock and subsequently of the carcasses and bones), the community of experts involved, reduced the physical signs by which the history of this event (this nomadic becoming) could be remembered or told. In the absence of relics and data, all fact and fiction is conflated, all borders between them are blurred and therefore subject, potentially, to wholesale dismissal as myth. But by ascribing greater significance to materiality and ensuring its strategic absence, the perpetrators of this act perhaps underestimated the ripple effect of that removal – into every void, the imagination will pour its will or its questions. Without the hard evidence to provide a satisfactory backstop to such suspicion, the impertinence of the questions is always likely to exceed what facts alone might have tempered or quelled.

In this work, the value of the leg and its transformation pertains to its role in the extruded and extruding process of liberation – the sheep remained out and over time became better capable of being so by a process of adaptive response to the environment.The symbolic driver – in representational terms is in a retrieved relic – even (by necessity) a faked relic, designed and made in order to give value to something observed but allowed neither to survive nor be measured and corroborated by instruments of science. For this artwork, the bone is extended in correspondence with the lengthening of the legs as was reported by some observers of the sheep. The gap of significance, is bridged by a hoop of silver, a material we accept culturally as being ‘of value’. The human representation and symbolic conferral of importance may even be seen as a compromise here, in deference to the semiotics of a culture that often fails to recognize intrinsic value. Here, silver gives presence to the missing, valuable, phenomenological and symbolic apparent ‘effect’. It signifies the change that is intrinsic to a) a period of time, b) a specific location c) the transitional condition of ‘becoming’ and in addition, both d) a theft and e) a possible conspiracy where all evidence of the flock and its bodily remains was eradicated deliberately, before biologists (for example) had the chance to examine them. Broadly it is the embodiment of difference – in opinions and of the contested claim that the sheep adapted as a consequence of having become feral. As there was no opportunity for scientific study to be conducted on the flock before or after slaughter, we mark a space in which this extension hovers between being a memorial and a relational corollary of being feral in a mountainous landscape. With this intervention, we keep alive the story of a community of domestic animals, which despite climatic inclemency and the seeming impenetrability of this landscape, survived without human care for three decades and indeed showed every sign that they might have continued to live there in perpetuity.

After-lives

The flawed nature of this enterprise, that is the inefficient and messy nature of the herding of the Tálkni sheep, had a retrospective after-effect, calling into question the validity of the enterprise itself. The very representational tropes which ennoble human agrarian enterprise, for example the promotion of efficiency in the management of land and animals of the kind implicit in historical paintings, (Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr & Mrs Andrews, Paul Potter’s Bull, and innumerable 17th Century livestock paintings), throw the dubious nature of the reclamation of the herd into sharp relief. Whilst involving a starkly different kind of relationship to our ‘landscape others’ there are parallels also to be drawn (and they have been described above in this text) between the controversy and contradictions embodied in this episode and those prompted by what has become an intermittent but recurrent phenomenon in northern Iceland – the arrival of ‘stray’ polar bears. Tidiness and order is threatened by the presence of the feral animal on the one hand and the appearance of the exhausted and dangerous alien wild animal on the other. Rather than engaging with complexity and being open to the opportunities it may offer, the default position of local and national governmental authorities seems to be to excise the agent that would test its borders, thereby allowing the maintenance of the status quo. The resultant human fault-line seems to run between two ideologies – a national, establishment view on one hand, in which the integrity of Icelandic farming (and perhaps culture) is an imperative. On the other, there is a growing lobby of those whose interests can perhaps be said to be less locally rooted and who are able at this point to exercise little direct power, but whose collective voice increasingly coheres around environmental ideas extending far beyond nationhood.

In another art project from 2010 entitled, Uncertainty in the City, we explored the idea of contested ‘human’ environments with specific relation to the presence of other species. The project hinged on an (albeit unwritten) assumption of neutral interspecific claim to territory and we conducted interviews with hundreds of participants in relation to their encounters with animals within and around the margins of their home. Along with an invitation to retell their stories we invited them to consider ideas of ownership, colonization and encroachment in this context. Given the space to objectify the experiences there was surprising openness towards questioning the rationality of their responses and to confront the emotional inconsistencies within such experience. The garden – a piece of land we suggested was a surrogate, albeit altered tract of ‘nature’ – is a kind of cultural epidermis by which tolerances and affections for others moving through, were tested and analyzed. In this project and more widely we use aberrant exemplars to challenge accepted behavioural and cultural tropes. In the Uncertainty project, non-human encroachment on human systems was often, although not always, viewed as a negative occurrence. Typical cases were the presence of ants for instance around the door to a house – the margins of tolerance were drawn in relation to the proximity to threshold or perceived infringement either towards or across that line. Urban foxes and seagulls are amongst the most consistently contested species and their presence is alternately construed as pleasant, desirable or offensive, according to the experience and/or conditioning of the humans concerned. In the case of the Tálkni sheep, however, the migration away from the human, in giving further dimensionality to the phenomenon of human/nonhuman entanglements, reminds us that our presence is neither necessarily crucial nor desirable for most species, even ones we’ve domesticated and trained to be reliant upon us.

The feral flock was a thorn in the side of the agricultural community – not necessarily those in the local area in question, but more starkly and tellingly, from a remote, central-administrative perspective. But in the resistance of something, particularly an entity that is normally attributed with little self-determination, as artists we see something much more interesting, in that it breaks the mould of our expectations – it draws our attention. The expression and enactment of capabilities beyond what we are given to believe is expected, forces us to re-examine our perception of that thing, and our initial reasoning for arriving at such a perspective. Did we believe we had modified the behaviour and capacities of the domestic sheep to the extent that it had indeed become an unreconstructed model of our projected will upon it? Just as we might enjoy the frisson of being lost when we believe that it is a temporary condition, so too do we find fascinating the idea that our constructed world-view is in some way destabilized by the will of another. In the same way therefore, when such aberrant behaviour is suppressed, there is a sense that an injustice is done. Something, which appeared to us to offer a new perspective – rather than being acknowledged and valued, preserved and observed – is eliminated purely in order that the status quo is restored and the behaviour-model is reaffirmed. Such action is based on an anthro-utilitarian approach that sees adaption or evolution within systems we have engineered around other adopted organisms as running counter to our interests and therefore undesirable. Simultaneously of course the phenomenon exposes the mythic projections we deploy in order to uphold our utilitarian requirements: if an organism is useful for this and that, then anything – any capacity, behaviour or inclination that does not support that function-set – may, if noticed, be deemed undesirable and may be subject to extirpation. This thinking is the basis of intensive breeding programmes and the kind of genetic modification that gives us for instance, hairless cats and seedless grapes. It is this single-mindedness that in modernity has caused us increasingly to consider things, places and beings in isolation. This has been to the detriment of possible developments towards a more coherent and complex world-view, which might privilege, instead, an understanding and appreciation of ecologies and the acknowledgement of material interconnectivity.

There is a tension between what we hold culturally as being right and proper and what we observe as a bid by another agent to disrupt that order. At the heart of this case is something that may be dismissed by many to be trivial and inconsequential; for us, in ways resonant with those ideas proposed by Jane Bennett (2010) in her book Vibrant Matter, it serves as a vital pointer to expose how human systems suppress the inclinations and capabilities of ‘things’, seeing instead only what we have designated for them. We have a tendency to blind ourselves to the wills of those outside our systems whose actions do not correspond with, or seem at odds with, our own – who are simply not compliant in the human enterprise at hand. When the animal agent is one with which we technically coexist, (a domestic animal) the oversight seems particularly acute. A lack of porosity is evident – a resistance to ideas or indicators of change – a reactionary dismissal of knowledge concerning environment and the adaptability of denizens – the shaping of existence by environment – the capacity of discrete environments to model not only new biological permutations but to spawn new behavioural possibilities as a consequence of introductions or migration – a failure on our part still to acknowledge that a condition of ‘becoming’ is actually the norm – in nature, stability and material independence are illusionary.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson

May 2013

 

Acknowledgements:

Professor Karl Benediktson for his assistance and support of this research. Unndór Jónsson for transcription of interviews and research assistance.

 

References

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things. Durham, Duke University Press.

Plumwood, V. (2000) Being Prey in J. O’Reilly, S. O’Reilly, and R. Sterling (eds), The Ultimate Journey, Berkeley, CA

Magnúsdóttir, L. Interviewed by: Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. Reykjavík, 25th June 2010

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. (2006) nanoq: flat out and bluesome, London, Black Dog Publishing

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. (2010) Uncertainty in the City. Berlin, The Green Box

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] nanoq: flat out and bluesome traced stuffed polar bear specimens in Great Britain from their current locations in museums and private collections, back in time to their Arctic encounter with man.

[2] In 2009 the authors were present at Skagafjörður in northern Iceland to witness a failed attempt to capture and relocate a polar bear discovered in the area. Despite a national will to manage the situation more adeptly than had been done in the past and Governmental involvement towards that end, the incident once more ended in the death of the polar bear.