Projects—Master PPS Performing Public Space

Jun 29

Jun 29 NONHUMAN ANIMAL AGENCY

Class 2019/20

In my research, I adopted the concept of agency as creativity that we all are capable and expressing within our daily existences. I asked how this notion of vitality of others such as free-roaming cats, can be acknowledged through different artistic processes and outcomes and how art can imagine new realities for the mutual benefits of nonhuman and human. What they chose for their home is what we named our public space. What if we shift our lens to free roaming cats as our collaborators that might lead us to the wilder part of ourselves? What new knowledge can arise if we feel ourselves “as if ” we were they? Through Utopian experiments and Interspecies communication, I tried to confront my own anthropocentric beliefs and invent new ways of collaboration with those Others. Above all, this research was motivated by the empathy toward nonhuman animals and what I call, irritation by things that make one’s heartache.

SPECIAL THANKS
Special thanks to all my collaborators, human and nonhuman; Darija Jurisic, Kristina Varovic, Lovro Rumora, Dalibor Zovko, Dora Boljat, Bozo Balov, Simon Ryle, Josip Guc, Anita Lunic, and to my mentor Danae Theodoridou; thanks go to my free roaming cat collaborators Micika, Cheri, Elvira, Kicho, Yeller, Binks, Djuro, Felix, my cats Chichi and Ixxo, and to all Others I shared space and time with.

Ivana Filip

Ivana (1978) is a Croatia based artist working across performance, video, photography and mixed media. Her long-term quest are humannonhuman relationships through the use of many tools coming from ethology, anthropology, animal studies, sociology, spirituality, activism and personal experiences. She confronts the others with their belief systems on the present ways of living and existing, notions of rightness, trust, empathy, other and otherness. Prior study of economics influenced her to question the sustainability of the art production and the creative process. She feels there is a moving power inside the creative process that reveals itself or sometimes not in the work of art, a small friction that changes one who creates but the one confronted with the artwork as well. She sees art as a tool and a strategy of everyday living. Ivana graduated at the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb and moving image at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

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