Recovery

More reading:

"The search for alternative spaces connects us with architecture as opposed to theater. Here we begin to function on a slightly different human scale." (Bryan Saner).

I find this inviting .. that by considering the space architecturally (including the light?) we might begin to play with scale. How small? How grand?

I remember this from the showing very strongly - the 'chicken warmer' lighting .. the way in which it seemed to make you (Natalie) bigger. As if the lights served to magnify your image, your being.

One thing that will need addressing (at some point) is that—in these times—a work called Recovery will be thought of in relation to economic recovery. Whether we like it or not, we will have to consider how the work will be 'read' in this light...

So proposed Jacob von Uexküll, today considered one of the greatest zoologists of the twentieth century. Uexküll's early investigations into animal environments express the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in life sciences, and radically dehumanize the image of nature. Where classical science imagined a single world containing all living species, hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms to the higher organisms, Uexküll instead described an infinite variety of equally perfect perceptual worlds, that, although uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, link together as if in a gigantic musical score. These distinct perceptual worlds, each with an animal at its center, he named unwelt: the environment-world constituted by a series of elements that he called 'carriers of significance,' or the only things of interest to the animal, in a closed unity with the receptive organs of the animal body (cf. Agamben 2004: 39-43).

In Uexküll's universe, there does not exist an objectively fixed wildflower stem, but only multiple wildflower stems as unwelt-specific carriers of significance. A child breaks one to weave a bouquet. An ant climbs on another to reach its nourishment at the flower's blossom. The cicada larva pierces a third and uses it as a pump to construct the fluid parts of its cocoon. The cow chews and swallows a fourth. Uexküll accords no particular privilege to any one among the infinity of wildflower stems, but only sees each as an element in a selectively sampled environment, one closed unity among the infinity of such unities.

Uexküll's studies on what we have come to call ecology situate themselves in German history in close proximity to the writings of Friedrich Ratzel on Lebensraum. Ratzel's theses, according to which all peoples are intimately linked to their vital space as their essential dimension, had a notable influence on Nazi geopolitics. In 1928, Uexküll wrote the preface to Houston Chamberlain's Foundatinos of the Nineteenth Century, a volume today considered one of the precursors of Nazism.

Goulish, M., & Bottoms, S. (Eds.). (2007). Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island. London: Routledge.