Celebrating Neighbourhood Birds: Performing Equality in Avian-human Performance

Abstract

Birds are messengers of climate change and loss of biodiversity. As a backdrop I use Henrik Ernston’s and Erik Swyngedouw’s suggestion of politicizing the environment in the era of the Anthropocene. Politicizing the environment is here fundamentally performative, which means that questions concerning environment are related to ecological understanding, egalitarian acting and respectful relationships. I argue in this text that considering and performing a non-human perspective is an equalitarian bodily practice of politicizing non-human beings around us. In this text I ask: how does avian-human performance practice politicize birds? I am interested in analysing what effects of differences are generated in the entangled relations of performance practice, and how do they relate to performative politics of equality. The concepts eco-justice, diversity, agential realism and Rancière’s performative politics, which are actualized in “distribution of the sensible”, are central in the diffractive analysis of non-human performance practice. In this pedagogically inclined artistic research project, I combined three bird discourses: the scientific, sentimental and “the reality-of-a-bird” discourses are embedded in performative avian-human performance inquiries. However, such studio practices are not enough. Scientific studies, combined with studies in indigenous knowledge systems and direct intra-action with diverse non-humans, can open deepened ecological understanding of the needs and desires of a more-than-human-world. Combining these aspects with performance practices may reveal more ways of politicizing non-humans and of voicing their needs and desires.