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.

 I’m currently reworking  Untitled (syncope) for this showcase

 here is the text from the Bristish Council

The British Council and El Teatro de la Laboral present S.P.A.C.E. UK, a showcase programmed to explore the possibilities of performance spaces. S.P.A.C.E. UK takes full advantage of the multiple spaces which make La Laboral a unique place to programme site specific projects and generate work linked to the building and its history.

The idea behind the showcase is to create links and promote networks amongst artists from different disciplines and countries. S.P.A.C.E. UK  is a showcase of the latest generation of contemporary British artists working in the area of performance. These are artists whose work is meant to be seen in a variety of spaces and not just on a conventional stage.

The pieces on show to audiences and programmers over two intense days at Teatro La Laboral cover a range of forms of expression. Live art, action art, intervention and manoeuvres will be presented by artists of the calibre of Kira O’Reilly, Rajni Shah, Peter Reder and Marc Rees, amongst others.

In addition, S.P.A.C.E. UK will be a place for professionals to meet and debate the uses of public spaces for the performing arts, as well as serving as a catalyst and meeting point for local artists.

You can find more information in this document and the detailed programme

www.teatrodelalaboral.com

Exit Art

New York City

February 28 – April 18, 2009
Opening: Saturday February 28, 7-10pm
Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), the second exhibition of Exit Art’s Curatorial Incubator Program, will present work by artists who are using bio- and media- technologies to investigate questions of life and death. Representative of a relatively new international trend, these artists are uniting science and art to challenge conventional understanding of both fields.

Prior to the eighteenth century, art and science were not separated as distinct disciplines, and were often joined. Thus a hybrid bio-art discipline is nothing radically new. Yet, the work in Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) represents a revolution in interdisciplinary research and practices and offers a critical evaluation of science and technology through art. This direct involvement of artists in scientific research and lab practices aims to demystify science through a cross-disciplinary approach; to provoke discussion about art and science as creative stimuli to each other; and to pose ethical questions to society.

The artworks in this exhibition deal with the transformation of our notions of life and death due to the implementation of biotechnological advances in everyday life. Recent innovations in science and technology are causing us to confront and challenge our conventional understanding of the body. Trying to reveal “the secret of life,” and to retain health, we are finding new ways to create living transplants and sustain life outside of the body. This possibility gives ground for the design of new organisms – hybrids, cyborgs and extended human bodies – that might be a new stage in an evolution with a questionable future.

Artists:

Suzanne Anker, Guy Ben-Ary and Philip Gamblen in collaboration with Dr. Steve Potter Lab (Dr. Steve Potter, Douglas Swehla, Stephen Bopic), BioKino (Guy Ben-Ary and Tanya Visosevic), Dmitry Bulatov, Center for PostNatural History, Kathy High, Soyo Lee, Yuri Leiderman and Andrei Silvestrov, Stelarc, The Tissue Culture and Art Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr), ULTRAFUTURO (Oleg Mavromatti and Boryana Rossa) in collaboration with Chris Bjornsson and Kathy High, Paul Vanouse, Jennifer Willet, Adam Zaretsky and the pFARM Collective

Feb 19, 19:00. Opening

The ICI Kulturlabor Berlin in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is pleased to announce an exhibition by visual artist and theorist Suzanne Anker.

The Hothouse Archives brings together two groups of photographs that picture the blurring of boundaries between nature and culture. The first suite of pictures, “Coral Seed Bank” (2007) capture fragments of brain corals suspended in tanks located at the Mote Marine Laboratory at Summerland Key, Florida. The morphology of coral, similar to the convolutions in the brain, create vital connections between all parts of the organism. The vivid colors are a natural wonder, rendering this stationary carnivore as a masquerading plant. In the second suite of photographs, “Laboratory Life” several layers of images are superimposed on top of one another in the form of a palimpsest. Images garnered from scientific laboratories form the technological base layer. An image of a transparent garden is then transferred as a top layer. The chance provoke questions concerning our enchantment with both nature and technology.

Suzanne Anker (www.geneculture.org) has exhibited her work at the J.P.Getty Museum, the Kunsthaus Meran, the Phillips Collection, the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in NY among others.  She has been a guest curator at the New York Academy of Sciences as well as the author of many texts concerning the implications of the bio-technological revolution on culture and society. She currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, where she is Chair of the Fine Arts Department.

Opening: 19. Februar 2009, 19:00.
The exhibition is open to the public until 6 March 2008 in the ICI Library (Mondays and Wednesdays 10 am - 3 pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays 1 - 6 pm).

Claudia’s trachea, porcine trypsin, pig tales, PIG 05049, bacon sandwiches, stand ins, stand outs, flesh of my flesh, green gills, cholorphil, chora ( “imprint-bearer”), making a pigs ear of it, making an eerie pig of it,  a silk purse out of a sows ear, tea time, teary time, torn thyme, flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor, as slow as possible,

 OPEN FORUM: ANIMALS IN ART

Wed 11 February 17:00

Accompanies Interspecies

As Animal Studies continues to grow as a focal point of academic enquiry, this forum looks to open up discussion around the question of animals in art and delve deeper into the underlying concept of our current exhibition Interspecies. There will be an open panel discussion and plenty of opportunity for you to debate, as we consider the representation or role of animals in contemporary visual art, performance and literature.

Chaired by curator Rob La Frenais, panel speakers will include Matthew Fuller (Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths), Robert McKay (School of English, University of Sheffield), Nicholas Ridout (Department of Drama, Queen Mary University London) and Steve Baker (Emeritus Professor of Art History, UCLan).

and me contributing to the panel discussion.

More information here: Forum text

image from video work by Ruth Maclennan featured in INTERSPECIES.

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.