BECOMING WITH with Moritz Geiser | Photo by Lindsay Tunkl & Amanda Ribas Tugwell
Image by MPA–B
BECOMING WITH
Kevin O’Connor (Erogate Performer) + Moritz
Geiser (Surrogate/Erogate Performer)*
Becoming with is the name of this game.
Becoming with is how partners are rendered capable.
Informed by Donna Haraway’s multi-species storytelling and practices of being in companionship, this piece turns towards pigeons. Pigeons, co-domesticated with people, have a very old history of becoming with human beings. They are creatures of the empire. They are working food animals traveling with European colonists and conquerors all over the world. Everywhere they have gone, these cosmopolitical pigeons occupy cities with gusto, where they incite human love and hatred in equal measure. Called “rats with wings,” feral pigeons are subjects of extermination, but they also become cherished opportunistic companions who are fed and watched avidly all over the world. What would a modest game in which people and pigeons tangled together look like? What will a multispecies worlding story (re)-enact? (O’Connor)
Performance artist, choreographer and scholar Kevin O’Connor grew up in a Canadian neighborhood where every Italian immigrant had a pigeon coop. Moritz Geiser, artist and psychologist, grew up in Munich, a very pigeon-unfriendly city. When Kevin heard about the massive amount of pigeon droppings that were shovelled out of the attic at Hochstr. 45 during renovation works, he proposed to devise a site-and-situation-responsive piece that would "bring these equally treasured kin and despised pests ‘back’ into the space". Engaging with the particularities of a place Kevin has never set foot into, as well as with the differences and similarities between himself and Moritz, BECOMING WITH attends not only to a connection between North America and Europe via human and non-human mediation, but to the space where genuine collaboration and shared authorship between strangers can emerge.
(*Kevin’s other ‘surrogate’ Edouard Steinhauer had to fly away after being offered an wonderful opportunity away from Berlin that he couldn’t refuse.)
www.ecologicalbodying.com
www.moritzgeiser.com
Curated by Ilya Noe
