The New Vitality: Art in Human-Nonhuman Ecologies / Human-Nonhuman Ecologies in Art

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Featuring presentations by artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Kika Thorne & Jem Noble. Introduced by Dr Emma J Roe (University of Southampton). Ideas of human-nonhuman relations permeate diverse territories of critical discourse1, providing what Emma J. Roe has expressed as 'a challenge to the category of the human'2. This challenge opens new spaces for understanding the concept of materiality outside of the subject-centred, instrumental division of the world into living beings and inert matter, in which human life has historically been conceived as occupying a position of supreme agency. The notion of human-nonhuman evokes the affective and afflictive power of matter as a differentiated field of acting things (what Bruno Latour has called ‘actants'), ever moving in shifting assemblages (including humans), accumulating, manifesting and dispersing powers to act with and on each other in ecologies of temporary material forms and relations. In this respect, humans can be understood to exert a far wider array of powers as sites of material action and interaction — as things — than as reflexive subjects. What are the implications of this non subject-centered, ‘thingly' conception of the world for producing and engaging with art? What can the situation of human-centred agency within the broader relations of material 'actancy' bring to notions of art's multiple uses, powers and responsibilities? Where do concepts such as ‘dematerialised' artwork fit in the realm of what Jane Bennet calls ‘vibrant matter'? Organised as an informal, public round-table discussion, this event will begin with three presentations by artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Kika Thorne and Jem Noble, introducing works that address issues of materiality from different positions. Rather than thinking singularly of the human-nonhuman as a frame for understanding these works, we might consider what distinctions might arise, if any, in the potential utility of the concept of human-nonhuman.