Closing
18. June 2025
16:00-22:00
About the project
Our project that consists of Susanne Büchele, Grayson Ruple, Viktoria Aksenova and Daniël Siegersma titled the Relationship, uses non-human creatures to explore complex social, political, and cultural topics in an unconventional way. Each creature represents a specific theme and engages through conversation with people and its own maker to explore these topics. These creatures strongly inspired by puppetry and cinematic props were physically created. The creatures are, the horseshoe crab, the leopard slug, the starling, and the seagull. By framing the conversation through the lens of the creature and the personal experience of the maker, we aim to create a space where complex ideas can be communicated in a digestible manner and to provide a new understanding, while also challenging human-centric perspectives.
In our universe, the creatures reside on a ship that is constantly on the move, figuring out where to go next based on the ones aboard. It first harboured at the "Republic of Love," at the Funkhaus formerly the ORF in Vienna, Austria, the Wienerfest Wochen set up multiple initiatives, exhibitions and performances in which our ‘Relationship’ also exists as an exhibition. On four screens every creature shows its own video collage. In this collage the recorded conversations, reflections and scenes the creatures experienced are shown. These collages will function as triggers for exchange on the Relationship. To speak deeper about the shown topics addressed in these videos. This we will do through live interactions, workshops and collect these observations and reflections that we exhibited in the physical exhibition space and on our website.
Our project is inspired by a pirate approach to democracy, power redistribution, and coexistence. We rolled into this by trying to find a method of interviewing, recording and finding a method of collaborating with each other. In Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations we found a mirror for our experimental project, the 18th century pirate ship that was practicing radical equality, electing leaders, sharing the plunder and making collective decisions. Our ‘Relationship’ fares with these values too, but is mainly a metaphor for exchange, to speak and undergo these principles. To stay true to the pirate nature of the project we hijacked audiences that went to the countless events organised by the festival itself, here our creatures roamed around and striked meaningful conversations with the festival goer.
(Footnote: Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (London: Verso, 2004), p62)
The Creatures
Reading list
Deming, A.H. (2014) – Zoologies: On animals and the human spirit. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Rediker, Marcus (2004) – Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. London: Verso.
Darwin, Charles (1881) – The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. London: John Murray.
Bennett, Jane (2010) – Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. (2016) – Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2017) – Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour, Bruno (1993) – We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ingold, Tim (2013) – Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. (Chapter: "The Textility of Making.")
Deterding, S. & Zagal, J.P. (eds.) (2018) – Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. New York: Routledge.
Graeber, D. (2023) Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Reason for Madagascar. London: Allen Lane.