The SPILL Salons are informal events that are intended to allow people to engage with some of the strands of practice and thematics presented during the festival.

Salon 2
Monday 13th April
3 – 5 pm,
The Edge, Soho Square.

Feasts
Food and eating as cultural, political, economic and social practices; celebratory, sensory, perceptual, feasts and feasting will be explored as an entry point to digest SPILL’s multitude of courses. Archaeologist Martin Jones will discuss how humans first came to share food and the ways in which the human meal has developed since that time and how our culture of feasting has had far-reaching consequences for human social evolution. Australia artist Boo Chapple will talk about her art project Hand to Mouth and it examination of means of production, economies and waste, UK based artist John O’Shea will introduce Meat Licence, an artistic intervention into meat consumption, legislation and ethics of meat production.

Bioethicist Andy Miah references falling asleep with a pig in reference to his new publication Human Futures.

Hi Kira,

I found ‘Falling asleep with a Pig’ touching, funny and moving. The arrival of the pig was amusing as it struggled on the slippy floor and squealed nervously at this strange new world until it could settle happily in the familiar and clean environment of the bed of straw.

It was intriguing to watch as you slept and rested in various parts of the pen. When you lay on the straw, the pig started to wag its tail. I hadn’t seen a pig do this before and it was very endearing. Come to think of it, I’ve never really seen pigs do much before, except in films, so it was strange to see this canine quality.

There is something very innocent about falling asleep and it takes a great deal of trust for two creatures to fall asleep together. I liked the way you and the pig got closer and closer, and as the light grew darker, until your two shapes were virtually inseparable. I pictured the pig’s eyes gradually dropping closed as it surrendered to this new and unusual friendship.

So there was a narrative to the piece that I liked and an ending I was happy with. I was entertained in a most unusual way.

It reminded me of Granny Jo Jo because I remember that you and she had in common a love of pigs when you were a child and when she was a regal, chain-smoking, brandy-drinking old lady. Didn’t she used to sign her cheques with a pig?

It reminded me of Mount Rivers because it had that marvellous zany, life-affirming warmth that I always associate with Ma, Helen and Granny Dot. The straw made me think of various farmyard animals that fill my childhood (and in some cases, recent) memories - Shane and his rabbits, Ma and her horses, Helen and her dogs, Granny Dot and her cats, you and your bat. It made me think of the turf shed, the hay barn, the long shed, baling hay up at the Foran’s or Sheehan’s.

I wondered what the pig was feeling - initially frightened, then bemused, then hopeful, then unsure, then anxious to befriend, then safe and happy and sleepy.

Maybe there was something protective about your relationship with the pig, like a parent to a child, and maybe that’s what I thought of Mount Rivers, too.

The pig was also black and I always think of you wearing black in Mount Rivers (though sometimes your hair was dyed), though that didn’t strike me at the time.

Lots of love,

Christian

Christian O’Reilly is a Galway-based writer. Two of his short films, ‘The Birthday’ and ‘The Kiss of Life’, have been produced and he has several feature-length screenplays in development. He also writes for television.

Photo credit, Elina Chauveaux
Non human animal, Deliah.
Cornerhouse, Manchester, 23rd - 24th January, 2009.

falling asleep with a pig, I think went very well and interestingly. It was very much the product of a collaborative effort from the producing and commissioning organisation The Arts Catalyst, the gallery Cornerhouse, an animal consultant, the people who work on Matlock Farm Park where the pig came from, myself and last but in no means least - the pig.

Generally for my art works - which invariably bring the movement and interventions into spaces with bodies be it my own, a public’s, a non human animals, a fragment of living tissue; I do most if not all of my research and acquiring of materials which invariably brings me into the realms of what you can do where, what you can and cannot get, negotiations, legislations, rules and regulations of bodies, materials, and how those change across spaces, institutions and contexts. Normally the intimacy the research brings generates a fair amount of the content. For this work The Arts Catalyst and Cornerhouse, in particular Gillean Dickie and Kate Jesson, took this task on. They engaged with everyone form DEFRA, to the RSPCA, to the city council, addressing issues of movement of livestock, biocontamination, and some kind of zoo regulations, what a public can and cannot do and what about the piggy in the middle of the whole thing. . Prior to the piece opening gallery technicians designed, built and made a dwelling space for Deliah (the pig) and I including a raised platform sleeping area for me. Another technician created documenting schemes, and gently lit the space. Someone ensured the gallery temperatures would not exceed 20 degrees Celsius – optimum piggy temperature, fresh and fragrant straw bedding was extensively laid, the roof shutters were opened to enable day light, tools and protocols were established with which to remove and dispose of pee and pooh that conformed to health and safety and bioregulations.

This created a very different kind of work for me - in that I was in some senses removed although my other commitments would of severely compromised the real time I had to make those investigations.

Someone described the work as “joyous”, they spoke about their little girl, aged 8, spending time – 15 minutes watching in concentration Deliah – the pig, and watching me watch her, and then watching me. The ambiance was soft, tender, quiet. Someone else – who wasn’t there, said they picked up from conversations with me, the tensions between the undercurrents of exploitation of animal in the piece with the obvious and explicit care for the non-human animal that was exercised on every level possible. I was preoccupied with the construction that the entire work was, from its concept, the physical desegregated habitat of the hybrid and displaying dwelling installation structure that articulated this, and of course she and I and how we slept.

We slept a lot. She proved to be a consummate napper, and not averse to my taking up a resting space in close proximity to her. Despite myself I fell asleep beside her in full public view a number of times. My capacity to slumber under gaze was surprising to me.

I thought a lot about the specificity of our two bodies coming into this peculiar proximity and our temporary arty space and what that was. I also wondered a lot about her and me and the multitude of micro organisms we were introducing to one another and the altering of our ecologies within and around us – intra and inter ecologies? Living in straw for 36 hours created a dry mouth, throat and upper respiratory system for me, that felt slightly but discernibly inflamed – so I pondered about how we are many and the intrusions of others and about the self/non self binary metaphors found in immunology. Somewhere Haraway talks about this being challenged and I think she talks about continuity as another metaphor. Continuums and partial overlaps and porosity or being defined by proximities to others and adapting and adopting others is more compelling to me. So I thought about the work as circulations of living systems on and off her and I as perhaps hosts. And the gallery host environment, producing in that moment and time new ecologies. As Haraway says:

I love the fact that the human genome can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent ofthe cells are filled with the genomic of bacteria, fungi, protistys, and such, some of which play in symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny  measurements. To become is always to become with many.

Dona J. Harraway, p.4, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

In her paper Flesh of the World Slovenian artist, Polona Tratnik writes:

In order to describe interweavence of things and space, a presence of a human body in the world into which it is immersed, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has created the concept of the flesh of the world. Things reciprocally belong to each other and thus form the same flesh, which is the flesh of the world.

A human being lives in an environment and is a part of it; he does not gaze at the world as at a display or something that is distant from him. He touches things and regards them. In such a manner he is seizing them, they are becoming a part of him. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is pointing out that space in post-Euclidian world is not a grid of relations between objects, is not a scene which is looked at as by a geometer from afar, but that, instead, space starts from me as the zero point of spatiality. A world does not exist in front of me, but is all around me and I live in it and am thus its part. I live it from the inside and am immersed in it. I am a part of the flesh of the world in which everything is interwoven. The world is made from the same substance as a body. Human body does not end with a rind of human organism, with skin, for example. It is expanding into space. It extends not only so far as I can touch things, but also up to where I can see them.

At a microbiological level micro organisms not only enter the human organism, but also get out of it into the environment. I refer here mostly to bacteria and fungi that live with us in symbiosis and also help us to maintain a healthy bodily balance. With an exchange of these micro organisms our bodies and things are in direct mutual contacts. Our organism can become resistant to some possibly dangerous species of micro organisms, so that the individual human cultures become adapted to specific environments, in which they live. At the same time some species that inhabit that environment can endanger some outlandish human organism. In this case the invisible organisms cause different kinds of illnesses. Likewise, some species that live with our organism in symbiosis, can, if our organism gets weaker (if its resistance decreases), multiply and attain such quantity that this again causes illnesses.

http://www.ars-tratnik.si/Polona%20Flesh%20of%20the%20World.htm

To become is always to become with many reminds me again to reiterate and to thank the many numbers of Cornerhouse people from front of house to behind the scenes who designed, built and cared for the work and who are still invigilating and minding it all so beautifully. It’s really a collaborative piece and I loved being only one of the many dynamic members of the team who made it happen - and to The Arts Catalyst, in particular Rob La Frenais and Gillean Dickie.

Kira O’Reilly (inthewrongplacesness, 2006), 2008

Graphite & watercolor on paper, 24 x 18 inches

Carrie Young writes:

In 2006 I did a performance piece with three other women. We danced around on stage wearing dirndls, doing the Chicken Dance, then peed on stage. The only way I got the courage to perform was by doing the whole thing wearing an animal mask. I was traumatized by the experience, not least because I was the only one of the four dancers who DIDN’T get performance anxiety (i.e. I was the only one who was able to pee; the other women just squatted in vain).

 The series of drawings “(My) Performance Anxiety” is about my conflicted relationship to performance art: on the one hand, it terrifies me (both as performer and as spectator), and on the other, I have an incredible amount of respect for and am inspired by women performance artists. In the drawings I project my shame and anxiety about performance art on to the images of famous feminist performance artists by placing animal masks on their faces. The simple, gestural drawings are a way of expressing or working through both my reverence for the artists I depict, and my feelings of personal inadequacy for not being brave enough to perform without wearing a mask. The colorful, playful mask neutralizes or makes comical work that, in its original context, was revolutionary, confrontational, and irreverent, thereby underscoring the importance of the women’s bare faces encountering and interacting with the audience.

Over the next few weeks, as I approach making a new work falling asleep with a pig, at Cornerhouse as part of INTERSPECIES produced by The Arts Catalyst. I’m going to try and blog some of the thinking behind the piece and the development of the work.

Many of the instances I refer to in the previous entry, of moments of collapse and flickering between bodies of different species, i.e. human and pig have been some of the genesis of this work. There is also an ongoing response of a kind to seeing pigs and other animals in large animal research facilities, as well as the ecconomies of species we use as other kinds of resource - like meat. I’ve wanted to make a very small, and gentle piece that examines the power and play between these two species - and with a living pig. As an emailer wrote to me in protest of my using dead pig bodies in my work:

"You can easily work with a live pig by the way.

They are very wonderful beings. Truly. "

Here is an early proposal for the work:

A sleeping action/installed performance by a female human animal and a female non-Human animal.

Human animal: Kira O’Reilly
Non-human animal: Female pig, yet to be selected.

Background:

This is a proposed new work that emerges out of previous research and art works that explored interspecies metamorphosis and mergences. These were developed whilst working with primary cell cultures of pigskin within a bioscience context and subsequent actions/performances with female pig carcasses. The investigations and the performance inthewrongplaceness, generated a variegated set of engagements with the actualities of working with animal as resource, animal within art practice and the troubled practices of both.

The notion of dream states suggests a common ground of consciousness and possibility, between myself and the pig, as species and beings.
We dream together and imagine our dreams interweaving and exchanging, girly pig and piggy girl.

The notion of the one on one encounter allows for an audience engagement that is singular, individual and potentially intimate. The is an incredible tenderness that I would like to bring to this work that can be more facilitated by the situation being framed and constructed as private and particular.
 Bodies touching, breathing, simply being in this altogether out of the ordinary event. Sleep is mysterious and ubiquitous.

The work is documented with both video and stills for further exhibition and dissemination and a writing that locates and articulates the ethical issues.

The work is an enquiry, there is not a fixed position from which I am trying to articulate a position and it is troubling in many respects. Much of the research and development so far has been about how to make a work that is the least stressful and taxing for the pig in question. An animal expert (wrangler) has been consulted, as has the RSPCA, Animal Welfare and DEFRA, considerable thought and ideas are being discussed as to what kind of pig will be OK alone with a human in an unfamiliar space. How can the gallery space be made suitable to accomodate her, me, health and safety and how will the large amounts of piss and shit be processed. The animal wrangler began our meeting with handing out copies of the 5 Freedoms:

1. Freedom from Hunger and Thirst - by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour.
2. Freedom from Discomfort - by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area.
3. Freedom from Pain, Injury or Disease - by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.
4. Freedom to Express Normal Behaviour - by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind.
5. Freedom from Fear and Distress - by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

He suggested working with a Vietnamese Potbellied pig and located one at Matlock Park Farm. I went to visit last week. She is small and dark, with black fur, her face not at all like the shape of the pink, piggy pig I had been thinking of. We took some photos, she didn’t seem to mind particularlry although both she and I got too cold. It became very clear that the work I am making is not and cannot be just about any generic notion of “animal” and “species”, it will also very much be the (in)precise encounter of two biocultural contingent entities being constructed by the specifics of their/our contexts, those that have made them and those that currently shape us.

Eva Hayward references Haraway observing that

Species exist in taxonomic differences (Homo sapiens sapiens is not the same as Octopus vulgaris), but species are also always already constitutive of each other through the spaces and places we cohabit—this of course includes language and other semiotic registers.

More Lessons from a Starfish:
Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves
Eva Hayward
WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 36, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2008

She is known as Deliah, here she is:

Someone asked me how I am going to get her to sleep. I’m not, she and I will spend some 36 hours in the gallery space and perhaps, she and I might fall asleep together at the same time.

 The Art of Helen Chadwick

at Factual TV

Until her unexpected death in 1996, Helen Chadwick was amongst the most sparkling, provocative and distinctive of artists. Her sensual and rigorously intellectual works explore desire, sexuality amd the body.
Produced alongside a major retrospective exhibition, organised by London’s Barbican Art Gallery, this film provides a rare opportunity to to reflect on her art. Important installations are featured, such as Ego Geometria Sum, which uses photographs of her own naked body, and the Baroque fantasy The Oval Court, as well as more controversial pieces, including Cacao, a fountain of hot bubbling chocolate, and the Piss Flowers, sculptures made by casting the holes left after urinating in snow.

It is just a delight, to revisit Chadwick’s work. My seeking her out was inspired by my recent visit to Mexico City and Adam Zaretsky’s vibrant DNA extraction workshop - so full of gorgeous sumptuousness, it reminded me of Chadwick’s vibrant 1992 tv doco about Frida Kahlo, and her seizing of a particularly chaotic, tactile unstable energy as she make a shrine to Frida with fruits and plants.

Adam’s DNA extraction workshop used a litany of plants, flora, fauna and  anything from anywhere that contains DNA during Accidente Controlados at Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City. It set up bawdy propositions of  porous contingent bodies that seemed to spill out of the strange hybrid skewering of realities at play in Mexico City. (Kathleen Rogers writes on my Facebook profile: Hi Kira I well remember Ex Theresa it’s a haunting place near the Zocalo and the Aztec ruins and everything else that’s hybridly alive in Mexico. Hybridly alive - her words put her finger on it precisely) The shrine he constructed before the workshop included the pig I had used in the version of inthewrongplaceness the previous night. Here’s a photo.

inthewrongplaceness

all photos by Antonio Juárez

13a Muestra Internacional de Performance “Accidentes Controlados”
Ex Teresa Arte Actual, México 2008

This version of inthewrongplaceness was made in the side chapel at Ex Teresa Arte Actual for small groups, 3 to 5 people. Like past versions, people were told they could touch both the human and the non human animal bodies, they were given latex gloves and an ethanol spray for their hands - a passing reference several times removed to bodies in biological contexts. They were given some 10 minutes to be in the space. it was cold, the 4 hours duration was shortened to 3 1/3.

The 48 kg female pig’s body, freshly slaughtered, bled and emptied of soft tissue, arrived some 20 minutes before the work, transported by car, and carefully places onto a gurney like a patient being assisted out of a small ambulance - an inverse of Beuy’s arrival in the US and transfer by ambulance to the gallery for I Like America and America Likes Me. I was aghast, she was not just empty of stomach, lungs etc but sliced entirely open, top to bottom, her entire self falling open and inside out like a book, her head sliced almost off. She became meat - and some spreadeagled anatomy lesson, all spine and bone. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to move her in that state - that she had departed too much from allmostthesame and those momentary flickers of whose who and what’s what. For a few panicked moments we attempted to staple her back together - which felt wretched and desperate and didn’t work. However her severely butchered state generated a whole array of new movements and engagements. I performed mirroring of her body, opening her partially and myself, legs scissored and chest open, like she and I are dancing girls lying on the cold stone chapel floor. I wrapped her into herself to make her whole and seemingly complete and then allowed both our bodies to be unfolded and opened, sometimes by me, sometimes by someone visiting the piece.

Many, many touched took place, I was the most touched I have ever been making this work, some were tender and curious, others made deliberate attempts to warm me and express tenderness. One or two took apart in carrying the pig lady body with me, her dead weight and unwieldy flesh topping and spilling out of our hands. Not many times I managed to carry her alone, across the floor, junctions of my bones supporting her on me and our awkward movements. At times a kind of penetrating anatomic, pornographic gaze of open, open and open some more delivered strong and uncomfortable moments; my legs being opened and then being turned upside down, my arse in the air, arse hole quivering and the spectator’s cool gaze. He seemed to play out some kind of scene - from his end anyway, entirely unegotiated and without consult - no thought as to a rough handling of naked flesh on stone floor, interesting. I was concerned that my silence would be read as passive meat rather than my curiosity driven  co-operation. I decided to get up, and decline his further interventions. His been witnessed by the other spectators created a layer of complexity.

The inclusion of the pig’s body in the DNA extraction workshop became both collaboratory  and celebratory as she became the centre piece in the shrine, pale green catus leaves on her scapula, like weird mutations, (a Pig Wings moment). Someone sliced apart of her to enter into the mash up DNA hybrid.

The run up to a version of inthewrongplaceness always echos with thoughts of the non human body that will join me in the work, my future piggy partner in our slow crushing dance - and the individuals of audience who will become part of the piece, points of contact, and each a vital and entirely other moment of our configuration.

I’m reading Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet and her working of knotty subjects and nodes between lineages of life, figurations of biocultural and social networks. The knottiness reminds me of my own preocupation with knots, originally borrowed from an Elizabeth Bronfen book, The Knotted Subject, Hysteria and It’s Discontents, and the dynamism of threads that knot into subjectivities, recalled as interior and bodily. Haraway’s knottedness speaks of arching and shifting junctures between and across individuals, kin, alliances, techno-somatic, temporal, spatial.

I thrive on textile and textual metaphors, tissue and techné threads and gaps, juntures and torchons, relational - all being experienced and lived as my very own often troubling essays of  uncomings with fleshy messes and messy fleshes, living, non-living, often troublingly consumed. Arm arcs into pipette gun connected to 10 ml pipette that aspirates and expunges DMEM and C2C12s into single cell solution, baby cow blood without the red bits stymying the enzyme decolonisation of the trypsin. My (my?) own knottyself -  contingent - deferred.

There is a hefty see saw, too violent to get to grips with the deorientation between the scale up and the scale down between species (non human animal model and human) and the very similar slides of cells, all very sick with illnesses of the muscle bits of body. Gestation parallels and checks made, in the knowledge building between the clinic and the place of research. Acute anguish of sickness, untimely losses creating another topple in the see saw of a lab meeting.

I am reminded of the girly piggy I’ll meet on Friday as I watch George Franju’s 1949 Le Sang des Bêtes, abbatoir scenes, brutal and stunning, cacophonies of twitches and flayings - butcher and surgeon techné of flaying. The blows delivering death also build cycst like swellings on the wrist that issues of the stike. The unrelenting repetition of carcassed bodies in the abbatoir call a stark visual memory I have of many pigs bodies on gurneys after a surgeons workshop, guts spilling, an ambiance of farm yard shit in the smooth clinical setting.

The film’s final text quotes:

I shall strike you without anger
And without hate, like a butcher.

The Man Who Tortures Himself, Les Fleur du Mal Baudelaire.

And finally, for this moment, the large and amplified pig carcass,  used as percussive instrument during Scott Walker’s Drifting and Tilting at the Barbican on Saturday night.

 Next week, on 21st November I am performing inthewrongplaceness as part of the 13th International Festival of Performance Ex Teresa Arte Actual 2008 “Controlled Accidents”

It’s hugely exciting, not just because it’s in Mexico City but also being invited to perform  within such a fantastic context and selection of artist.

This work has been remade for a number of contexts, sites and spaces, each one tangling with and informing the action in radically differing ways.