Multispecies rug at m/other becomings exhibition growing under a lamp light at art-lab Gnesta, Sweden 2021. The materials: sprouting oats and peas that my companion animals eat. Tendery collected fur of goats and cats, human hair, peacock feathers from my companion animals as a living, entangling assemblage.
Multispecies rug manifesto
The multispecies rug is made out of the belief that co-existence with other than human animals can increase responsibility towards them. The rug is manufactured with tenderness, listening and observing companions and becoming together in a new composition or assemblage. It requires placing human in the animal continuum. The multispecies rug is a living body but it is not a hybrid that produces a generic difference. Rather it emerges mutually inclusive vital gesture as described by Massumi (2014). It is a post-anthropocentric becoming animal or a becoming with animals and collaboration with nonhuman agents.
Multispecies rug making is a sympathetic and speculative door opening where the agency is distributed. The human intention is not central. It is ethico-aesthetic material-gathering and kin making that tunes towards the nonhuman expression and affect. Ludic gesture is impotent unless it captures the others attention, rug making thus is an act of love that should resonate one way or another to our companions.
Brushing a goat is care that leaves a human hand with fluffy matter. There is hair fallen from human head and feathers dropped by a winged companion. Seeds and grains we all eat are binding the rug together with their living roots. Matters meet and become in a platform of compost made out of manure of goats or other soils that provide microbial companionship to macro-materials. The adhesive that enables entanglement of beloved matters and bodies.
Multispecies rug encourages to think material entanglement beyond instrumentalizing scope by composing matters differently. Pursuing ethico-aesthetic becoming, symbiosis, or creative evolution it grows species together creating a new type of holobiont. Multispecies rug states we are not separated entities although we have separated bodies in space. We speak, sing and bleat in a different language but we have a sympathetic tendency to comprehend each other. This is not the first becoming, we have always become in our relations as Haraway (2016) and others reminds us.
Sources:
Massumi, Brian (2014) What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
The video work about multi-species care and material and affective enmeshments
