Non-human Narratives

  • 2021

„It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”.

D. Haraway

The work encourages listening to human and non-human voices in juxtaposition, entan-glement and overlays of sounds in order to prove that all earthlings have much more in common than we humans have courage to acknowledge.

It suggests that the non-human language is present also within our bodily capacities and its sonority brings us closer to our more-than-human fellows, allowing us not only to connect with them but also to apprehend the status of nonlexical forms of communication, including those which lack volume and presence due to anatomical size limits (e.g. a bee, an ant, a beetle). Finally, this installation is a proposal of a new interspecies form of contact, which could build a new inclusive bridge between us and grant the non-human narratives a much deserved place in the storytelling of the planet.

The work was commissioned by European project Sounds Now – Sound Art in Public Spaces and curated by Raquel Castro, with the help of November Music Festival 2021, Den Bosch (NL), where it was first shown.