InterArts Faculty ember Bryan Saner is performing with Stephen Fiehn and Every House Has A Door at the Following Nonhuman Kinds conference at the the Ecloe Nationale Superieure D’Arte (ENSA) in Bourges, France, April 17- 18, 2014. The conference is part of Caroline Picard’s curatorial project, Ghost Nature.
Everywhere we turn, we find a territory of nonhuman things. It is impossible to escape the material din of others — from material structures: plants, robots, animals and objects, to those all but invisible bodies outside the bounds of human perception: atoms, molecules, pollutions, viruses, satellites, planets et al. While humanity has historically identified itself as something categorically superior to all else, this multi-medium platform attempts to revise the theoretical terms with which we engage our landscape. From the 17th-18th of April, 2014, Following Nonhuman Kinds pursues the complicated strangers among us, ignoring hierarchical conventions in order to reframe and reconsider the interstitial, interspecies web we inhabit.
Following Nonhuman Kinds appropriates the format of an academic conference in order to facilitate an ephemeral, social project, deliberately extending the life and bounds of Ghost Nature — a group exhibition at La Box — into the hands of a public audience. Ranging from lectures about an 1,800 year old text describing ants and labyrinths, to a performative reinterpretation of Charles Reznikoff’s poems on the Industrial Revolution, to the erotic potential of the earth, and a student exhibition created in response, Following Nonhuman Kinds attempts to destabilize traditional distinctions between the natural and unnatural world by way of public, intellectual engagement.
Participants include: Sebastian Alvarez, Bandits-mages, Bruno Blairet, Isabelle Carlier, Le Laboratoire du contemporain, Emmetrop, Every house has a door, João Florêncio, Stephen Lapthisophon, Nadège Piton, Jamilee Polson-Lacy, Tessa Siddle, Pacôme Thiellement, Transpalette, and students at ENSA de Bourges.
