Untying the Knots: Relational Art and Interspecific Encounter

Abstract

In this essay, the collaborative artist team, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson present, through a series of their projects, some of the ways in which they have conceptually and strategically re-framed perceptions of relationships between humans and others and for what purpose. They demonstrate how mechanisms of ‘encounter’ between humans and the non-humans are established, mobilised and considered as a catalyst for new environmental thought. From their first experiments in institutional critique, challenging museological, animal representation in nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2001–2006) and perceptions of domesticity in interspecific habitation in (a)fly (2006), they gravitate to the concept of ‘encounters’ in the strategised meetings of between you and me, Three Attempts (2009) and Vanishing Point (2011). They consider the management of near-extinct species through the frozen condor bodies in the photographic/video works of You Must Carry Me Now (2014) and in one of their most recent projects, Beyond Plant Blindness (2017), ideas of interspecific encounter involve shifts in scale and the strategic slowing down of thought in order to sense ontological ‘difference’. In all this, there is for them, a driving imperative to unlock new ways of thinking and to offer unfamiliar and often necessarily ‘odd’ approaches in order to unravel established behavioural and perceptual knots and to create a freer and more productive flow of (for instance), intelligent, sensitive and imaginative environmental response.