A performative reading about human-more-than-human communication, hunting and intersubjective experience. During the reading, four performers play a score created for the ‘game-calling-instruments’ to interact with the text. The score is based on bioacoustic research, specifically the acoustic-niche-hypothesis by Bernie Krause.
Excerpt from the text:
The hunter is using mimetic practices when imitating the alarm call of the deer. Still, in his case, it is rather to trick the animal closer to his hide-out spot instead of developing an intersubjective experience that is based on empathy that reveals that there is a practical side to perspectival thinking, which registers both sameness and difference, of being and self and other. He does not consider the interest of the animal to simply survive. He rather justifies the killing with the need for population control, as otherwise, the currently dying trees cannot be reforested because the deer is eating up the newly planted seedlings. Within his territory, he says he keeps the system in balance without considering that it just got out of balance because of us placing ourselves above the forest and transforming it into this monoculture that just had to function to our needs — a constant loop of being stuck in this Western hegemonic perspective that brought us to the current situation. We stopped listening without an agenda to other entities. We unlearned that there is a constant connection between our bodies and the environment and that there lies meaning in this connection. The breath that is forming the words I read, that is moving through the instruments just played, that we exchange in this room, is air, is wind, is reciprocity.
Performed at M HKA in Dec 2023 together with Wietske Gils, Tracy Hanna, Emma Kraak, and Stine Sampers, and at Enough Room for Space/FeliX Art Museum in June 2024 together with Emma Kraak, Roxane Métayer and Caroline Profanter.
Nele Moeller 