LIMINAL ANIMALS

LIMINAL ANIMALS

Liminal animals are not aliens or trespassers who belong elsewhere. In most cases, liminal animals have no place else to live; urban areas are their home and their habitat. — Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis, p. 212

This is an invitation to step into the spaces between categories, to nest between the cracks and to darken the doors. What are our relational obligations towards those who exist neither as wild nor domestic, who make their homes with our constructed worlds? What stories emerge when we refuse the binary thinking that sorts life into neat compartments of nature and culture, belonging and trespass, welcome and unwanted, unruly and tamed? How might we learn new forms of attention, new ways of communicating across species differences? Liminal animals are characterized by their living situation, not their species identity. They are foxes threading through suburban gardens, crows who remember your face, pigeons whose ancestors worked for and resisted ours, rats that know their way around places that we tend to avoid, as well as cats and dogs that left ‘their‘ humans and went feral, by choice or by accident. Existing in what Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka call the space of "denizenship"—they are an integral part of our daily lives, but yet not fully included in our political imagination.

Together we will explore multispecies methods, that provide space for deep encounters and understanding. We will try out practices as Intuitive Interspecies Communication, in which we invite liminal animals to approach us, instead of approaching them. We will search for ways of creating and presenting that include our more-than-human neighbors in the city. Bring your curiosity!

Guests:

Marta Bogdańska (Visual Artist, Photographer, Filmmaker, Warsaw, PL)

Shumon Hussain (Principal Investigator, Deep-Time Archaeology, MESH (Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities), University of Cologne, DE

Workshop:

Co-creating with other species via Intuitive Interspecies Communication (telepathic and embodied communication), Inga Hamilton (Autistic, sculptor, jeweller & PhD researcher, University of Sunderland, UK)

Excursions: Into the urban space, above and below ground

Reading List:

DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Repr. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014.

Kegel, Bernhard, Tiere in der Stadt: Eine Naturgeschichte, Dumont, 2013

Nagy, Kelsi, and Phillip David Johnson, eds. Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Philo, Chris, and Chris Wilbert. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. Critical Geographies 10. London: Routledge, 2000.