About

Traditionally, especially in my Western, Christian tradition, we have thought of more-than-human animals as being unthinking entities, set upon this earth for our benefit. This idea of the “other” as unintelligent, has made us comfortable with the extreme violences that feed our hyper-capitalist societies. We are violent towards the more-than-human. We are violent towards our planet. We have taken agency away from the “other”, undermined intelligences that are different than ours, we turned the other into monsters - or domesticated them.

In my work I aim to disentangle these stories we tell in two distinct ways. Part of my practice revolves around looking at the ways in which more-than-human actors experience the world we cohabit. These works create spaces for deep listening that transpose these other sensibilities and intelligences into a human modality so that we too can experience the outersonic, outertactile, and outervisual signals that they are attuned to. 

Other works directly unravel our mythologies to uncover the violence hidden within. In What Worlds Make Stories I employ an alien, absurdist perspective to reflect on the politics of the monster. Who makes them, who unmakes them, by which method, and with which purpose?

In these wicked times we will need to rethink our narratives and reassess our kinship with more-than-human species. We need to develop new ways of perceiving, new types of sensibilities, and new ways to sense and make sense of the extremely slow, diffuse, or weak signals that the “other” sends. Tuning in to the more-than-human signals can give us clues for alternative, adaptive ways of living with, rather than just on the earth. And to create these new relationships, as with every lesson, as with every new skill, as with every new insight, we must start by listening.

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My practice has been generously supported by the Dutch Mondriaan Fund, AFK, and Amarte

Photo by Wouter LeDuc