Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Lauren Kuby: Now I’d like to introduce Ron Broglio, who is associate professor in the college of liberal arts and sciences. He’ll introduce our special guests, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson.

Ron Broglio: Great. Thanks a lot. Thanks for coming out. This is really thanks to GIOS, and also to the School of Art, who have made this event possible. Mark and Bryndis are here for a grant through GIOS on visualizing sustainability and basically looking at the rhetorics that sustainability scientists use and the rhetorics that various publics use, and doing a sort of visualization as some sort of artifact or element that will capture the contrasts, juxtapositions, and possibilities within those multiple discourses because we’re not always using the same languages, nor talking with each other.

This is part of an ongoing project that will, then, be realized in a piece at the ASU museum about this time next year. Thanks, folks, for that. Bryndis Snaebjornsdottier is professor at University of Gothenburg. She has also had the fairly new Center for Art and Ecology there. That Center for Art and Ecology, which also includes a residency program, was fashioned after her work. It was really wonderful that she was able to make that possible. Then Mark Wilson, reader at University of Cumbria, and also an excellent and rather talented musician on the side. Just played a live gig for the BBC recently, BBC radio.

In any case, I’ve always said that animals are the fur that jams the well-oiled social—the gears of the well-oiled social machine. Here to look at how the fur jams the gears are Mark and Bryndís.

Mark Wilson: Thanks, Ron. That seems to be working. Thanks very much. Yes, we’re here and we’re very excited to be here. This is right at the beginning of a two-week research trip for us, so it’s brilliant. We arrived yesterday, and we’ll be straight in first thing this morning talking to you all. We are really very excited and hoping to meet many of you again and other people from the university and the museum and so on. We’d like to thank Ron, of course, and the Global Institute of Sustainability and the School of Art and the ASU Museum of Art.

I’ve written down a short introduction, just so that, in a sense, I set the context for the projects which we’re going to sort of show you, just with a view to this particular sort of context, I think, this particular setting. The talk will draw chiefly on four of our projects that we’ve made over the last few years. The plan is to keep it to 30 minutes, which is difficult because a lot of the projects we do can take up to five or six years in the making, the research and the making and so on. But we often work on more than one project at the same time.

Keeping things sort of overlapping, and as one thing sort of comes to a conclusion, we’re still already working on one or two other projects simultaneously. Currently, we’re working on two projects which we don’t have time to discuss, which is feral attraction and matrix. One focuses on a flock of feral sheep in the Westfjords in Iceland. The other focuses on polar bear dens. But both emphasis the relationship between beings and the habitat of those beings. So the projects will represent the following: “A Fly,” “Uncertainty in the City,” “Cities of Cliffs and Legers,” and “Vanishing Point.”

Each is explored with a particular set of ideas in mind to highlight the nature of our taxonomic framings and what they do to us, in turn, to our conceptions of the world, in this way, and provides opportunities to reappraise cultural norms, we believe, and can point the way to living and acting with a consciousness of a cross-species collective. As a species, we have a tendency, in our intelligence, to delimit our imagining of things, their order and their relationships to one another, according to what we imagine is relevant and appropriate to our needs.

Often, these needs are conceived by others on our behalf, and even if, in the past, we’ve exercised our own judgment, the needs we identified and settled on at some point long ago become redundant. Yet, we continue to be slaves to them. Because we are creatures of habit, without recognizing it, as time goes on, our circumstances change. Our knowledge and the context for that knowledge change, both within and around us. In turn, our habitual positions are themselves in need of reappraisal.

A significant mechanism for rethinking our position to others, and indeed, for thinking through positional relativity more widely, is to apply the principles of material agency—as Jane Bennett puts it, distributive agency—and to understand that the value of significance or significance of things is, in itself, unstable, unreliable, indeterminate, not fixed. In this respect, value or significance is measurable only in relation to the proximity or distance of a constellation of other presences. What is expected under these circumstances? What is observable?

What else might be made to happen? Such thinking invites an acceptance of uncertainty. For too long, our need for certainty has been unwaveringly in the service of human desires, in cognitive and physical isolation. How these factors, these histories are brought and weighed together is inevitably and serially slewed by preconceptions and by innate or learned prejudice, and also by tolerance or affection. How we respond or adjust effectively will be determined by our willingness to bring some other principles to bear, including non-human principles and interests. In short, who is the “we” on matters of sustainability? We speak of us.

Okay. So the work we make is our contribution to this necessary ecological dialogue, bringing ideas of constructive uncertainty, respect, cross-species parity, hospitality, inquisitiveness, and the genuine desire to learn.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: Okay. Can you hear me? Yeah. Strange talking in a microphone. But I’m—we can’t really begin any talk without actually beginning and saying a little bit about this work here because this is really the work where it all started. It wasn’t that we just came and we decided that we got all these problems in the environment, so we’re gonna make art about this. It actually happened that we actually came upon it through another project. I’m just gonna say a little bit about this project. It was kind of a survey, an artist’s survey, and we decided to find all the stuffed polar bears within United Kingdom.

We did everything we could to find all of them. Of course, we didn’t find all of them [laughs], but when we found them, we photographed them in situ, and we gathered all the information we could get about their histories, where they have traveled from the place of origin to the place we found them in. But to come to making that project and that work, it came through a kind of a project that was associated with identity a little bit. We were actually beginning working together at the time, so this project also kind of cemented this kind of what was to come, our collaboration in art.

Now we only work collaboratively and have been doing that for 12 years now. So the project started in 2001, and it started through being through another project in the situation where you were in a warehouse, a building in which animals, stuffed specimens, were stored. As it so happened, at the time, they were out of display in the museum in Glasgow, as it was, and the contest and the reason for them being out of display was because they were only, at that time, showing animals indigenous to Scotland. We wanted to photograph these polar bears we [inaudible] in the store with all these other animals from all over the world.

It was the most amazing big warehouse with all of these. To get to the polar bears, we had to push all the other animals away to get to photograph the polar bears. In the process of doing that, something incredible happened. You just realize that you’re in this kind of situation in natural history museums and you see all these animals, but they are behind glass. But there, you were actually touching them. For me, particularly, touch a saber, touching a polar bear, touching different—it just completely imprinted on me and had a huge impact. Also, I started to ask questions, like, what is it? Is it an animal?

How come that the ones that were made really badly—Steve Baker is called the botched taxidermy—that they, actually, you got in touch with the living self, somehow. The ones that looked really, really perfect, their sort of life as individual bears were sort of glossed over, so there were just too many questions that actually this whole project backed up to actually let it just go. So I’m just giving you a context of why we, for 12 years, have carried on working with animals as a sort of subject within our art. So then it was the next project, the theme with polar bears.

Actually, that project didn’t even finish until 2006, but before, we had started this project. It was in [inaudible]. We wanted to look at sort of pets, but pets within that environment. This whole idea of what actually meant, what kind of different relationship does one have with a pet than something as wild and big and charismatic as a polar bear. But of course, a pet is also often a charismatic animal, very often, but not always. Not always. Some people have different pets. Is this—

Mark Wilson: I think it’s okay. Yeah.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: We decided to start the project with a sort of a survey that we invested ourselves. In Iceland, there’s a custom that there’s a particular bird that they have for Christmas dinner, and it’s ptarmigan. It’s a bird that lives up very high in the mountains. You’re allowed to go and shoot this bird at a certain time of the year, from October to December. It’s kind of—of course, it’s associated with a bit of machoism, but still, people who do and go and are allowed to shoot this have to—they go through really strict courses to get a license for having the guns.

They have to learn about the animals, as well as learning about the guns. The birds are—most are shot with so-called scatterguns. I don’t know if you know what they are.

Mark Wilson: Shot guns.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: They’re these kind of guns that distribute loads of bullets in one shot [laughs]. So what we wanted to do was that we wanted to use this as a method to find—to conduct our survey. So we advertised for some shooters, ptarmigan shooters, to come forward and to shoot at a mark of the city of Reykjavik, which we had got from the council. We gave them a certain distance. It was quite a long distance. They shot and they only got one shot at this mark. That was what we used, then, to identify places that had got shot. So we got these four marks and we took an image at the same time as the shot happened—they shot from the gun.

So we used the—because you could—I don’t think I have an image. Now I can’t see the next one. This is an image as we took. This is him shooting, and this, you can see, there’s a lot of cartridges on the ground there, but it’s not from them. It’s just it is a playground for shooting where this happened. Then here, you see the map and you can see how it was. So for example, we were able to detect the building from this and where the shot had gone. Then we would register it and we’d phone them up and ask them if they had the pet in the household. Then we asked them what kind of pet it was.

Then we’d ask if we could come and visit their home and take a photograph, not of a pet, but of the environment that the pet occupied when they were not paying it any attention. So we wanted to try and find out sort of how—what kind of, I guess, identities the pets take within the home environment. Basically, this is the result of the survey that we did. It sounds quite brutal. I was actually thinking is it appropriate to show it to you. This is going to be really confrontational to put this up. But this is what it did. We also wanted to be a bit confrontational because what is our relationship with animal?

We have one on the table at the same time as the other one is on the sofa, eating one while we’re patting the other [laughs]. So it’s kind of—we wanted to think about these things. So these are the kind of places that we were invited to. The people, of course—sometimes, when you go into homes and you create, as a community around your work, you have to do something for people instead. So sometimes we take a photograph of the pet for the people to have a photograph of the pet. But we have no interest in that. We were just interested in this.

What we were thinking about was that we wanted to try and bring the camera always in the eye level of the pet. So it was depending on where it was and what kind of pet it was where the camera was kind of focusing. I guess working with this kind of what do we—we sort of project a lot of ourselves onto our pets, isn’t it, and sort of through the image and putting those in the focal point where we are actually—we wanted to sort of find out what happens in that process. But pets choose the most amazing places, and they choose places that we are maybe not in, under stairs. Some have a bit more prominent place.

This one was on the shelf in this lounge. This, underneath, is the name of the animals concerned. These names, although they’re sort of Icelandicized names, they don’t really tell you anything about what kind of pet it is. So you have to sort of guess a bit by the environment that you’re actually looking into. At the same time as we did this, also, we decided a certain area within Reykjavik, it’s kind of one on one. It’s called the main center area of Reykjavik, but it’s also an area that has a lot of mixed population, as well. At the time when we were doing this project, we worked with a local school, a local primary school.

So we had children, and we actually worked with the teachers and I would go, sometimes, and be with them in the class. We worked with them—they were from the age of 6, right up to 15, to actually do sculptures and paintings and drawing from their own pets. They were writing stories about—was it where the pets came from?

Mark Wilson: Yeah. Asking them to imagine what the nature environment, the environment outside of the home, the natural environment of individual pets would be. Where did that cat originally live, for instance, or where would their dog originally live if it—which is, in a sense, it’s a conundrum because, of course, these are thoroughly domesticated over millennia. But nevertheless, as an imaginative exercise because the project is, fundamentally, about habitat. It’s about the pets choosing a habitat within the habitat of the human.

The other principle sort of idea is that the, of course, the pet actually lives in the human home, probably more than the human does. So, yeah.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: Yeah. No, I think that’s—I mean, and there was kinda—or maybe just talk a little bit about that there was this strategy, as well, because when you’re working in this way, there’s a lot of trust involved. You’re going into people’s homes and photographing and you’re being within their environments. Actually, being within the school, working with the children, kind of constantly sending notices back into the home about there are these artists working in this area with this project. So you kind of break down a lot of barriers and you get out a lot of information.

Then, in the end, what we did after, we had an exhibition, which was in—it was in a few parts. It was in the National Museum of Iceland. The children, also, had an exhibition of their work. Then we—a part of our project, the environments and their stories that they had written about where their pets originated from or their imaginary environments for their pets, that was in the National Library in Reykjavik. So then we go onto another project, which is a little bit more different. You’re gonna deal with that.

Mark Wilson: Okay. Okay. That project was the last one, “A Fly,” was shown in 2006. On the back of that project, we were invited by this institution here, the Story Gallery, to do some—we were commissioned, basically, to do a project which was similar, perhaps, within the city of Lancaster in the north of England, which is an old sort of university town. But it’s also surrounded by a lot of different types of countryside and so on. So it’s coastal, or it’s semi-coastal, and there’s sort of mountains to the east and so on, and a lot of different sort of environments.

So what we decided to do was, rather than repeat ourselves, which we would kind of rather not do, we decided to actually put the focus, instead of within the home, we decided to explore the margins of the home so that we would, for instance, think about, well, specifically, about pets in relation to an urban situation or a certain domestic situation. So we’d be thinking, for instance, about gardens, thinking also about the wall cavities, the spaces between, underneath the floor, and so on, where we, unwittingly, coexist with other species.

So one of our ways into this that we thought was kind of a sensible approach would be to work with pest control because what we identified fairly early on is that—or what we suspected and confirmed is that a lot of people feel very uncomfortable about living in that way with other species. Of course, the people who are gonna be fielding that kind of about people’s anxieties about that kind of coexistence would be the pest control office. So we hooked up with hem pretty early and asked them a whole bunch of questions. Then we went on a series of excursions with pest control in the course of their day-to-day business.

In addition to that, we visited people that were, for instance, there’s a guy here who was a feeder of pigeons, but on an industrial scale, so he lives in this little terrace in the middle of Morkam, which is just a town next to Lancaster. We were told by the pest control people that he’s a constant source of trouble, really [laughter], to put it euphemistically. Yeah. So we were driving down this street and wondering, looking for the address, and suddenly, we realized that—we saw this semi-attached house, and on the—literally, on side of this semi-attached house, there was this huddle of—the whole roof was covered with pigeons.

On this other side, there were no pigeons. So we said, well, that must be it. So anyway, so he wasn’t in. We talked to the neighbors, and the neighbors spitted sort of vitriol about their next door neighbor, the neighbor from hell. So it happened a number of times during this project, Uncertainty in the City, where, in a sense, what was contested or what was, in a sense, rather schizophrenic, in terms of human behavior or human attitudes towards individuals species in proximity wouldn’t be where it ended.

There was this other sort of layer, where people were actually in battles with each other about—perhaps one family would be feeding the foxes while another family were trying to eradicate them, causing a great deal of tension. So there’s this tension, like a doubling up or layering of tension. So this is JW, who just, as I say, he goes out in the street and he sort of empties bags of corn onto the street twice a day. You can see the pigeons for miles around, sort of all gathering on the rooftops.

Then they all sort of come down and—then that triggers off a reaction from the neighbors, who then start banging the garage doors and swearing at him [laughter]. It’s palpable. It’s really, really very, very tense.

Audience: You need a shotgun there.

Mark Wilson: Yeah. So anyways, so part of the project involved, rather than just being just sort of piggy-backing on the pest control people or just fielding sort of stories about individuals, we decided to go out and sort of—into very sort of communities of people who, around which, an interest in animals really seems to coalesce. So to do that, we visited game fairs and country fairs and stuff. We took this mobile unit, which is basically a converted caravan, and inside we sort of stripped it all out and painted it sort of urban camouflage and stuff, just to get people in the spirit.

This would actually attract people, and it was a really wonderful tool for attracting people to engage in this conversation. This is actually the time we took it down to the A [inaudible] Foundation in London. We drove this thing all the way down the M6 into London. This is an odd venue and it was a show called Interspecies. We were part of the show and a seminar and conference and so on.

There were people sort of coming in, and people would queue to get in and talk to us about these experiences they’d had with encounters with particular animals, and it could be rats, it could be pigeons, it could be frogs, toads, foxes, any number of different things. Because the most amazing thing was we found that people were really moved, but they didn’t really have a forum for expressing this thing. Sometimes it was something that they found very, very disturbing. Sometimes it was something that they found very privileging, this proximity with this other species. We were discriminating.

We were kind of happy to take all these stories. So we gathered them, we recorded them. This is a little hand-held—we were just picking this stuff up all the time. Gradually—what’s the next one, Bryndis? Yeah. Also talking to pigeon fanciers, a whole different kind of dimension of experiencing pigeons, where they become this sort of rather sort of special breed. Of course, their bug there is the peregrines that sort of zoom in and sort of wipe them out as they come home in the last 30 miles, usually, of when they’re returning home.

So this is our caravan sort of looking amongst the—these are all sort of the rat poisons and this is someone’s—I think it was an organic green pest control guy. He had to stand there, so we were sort of lurking in the background there [laughter]. The next one Bryndis? Yeah. We also did—it was quite a long project. It was 2007-2010. All the time we were doing these things, we were taking the caravan to these places, picking up more and more stories. In the end, we picked up something like 200 stories from people which were recorded.

This was at Glysdale Arts, which was a fairly well—very well-established contemporary arts agency in the South Lakes. They’re an international-based organization. So we had this meal where all these things were being discussed, and there were various sort of people. There was a farmer there. There were people from the arts. There were people from—I can’t remember all the different things. What we do try and do, in the course of most of our projects, at some point or another, is we try to involve people from different constituencies, people with different vested interests in the subject that we’re exploring.

Because very often, those people will not really tend to talk to each other. So we use that as a kind of vehicle for getting that kind of discourse going because discourse is kind of where the work is, really. It’s that idea of, well, let’s unpack this. Let’s unravel this and see what’s driving it and how much it’s just kind of knee-jerk stuff, the stuff that we’ve inherited from our parents or from—and that sort of thing.

So anyway, that project ended up with this particular—as well as being a website, the website was used to gather more stories and to be something that people could sort of touch base on and sort of learn more about the project, it ended up in an exhibition in Autumn 2010. This was the poster for the exhibition.

This is kinda quite important, this idea of—because what we’re not touching on very much today about our practice is this idea of representation and how much, in a sense, potential damage our representations of things does and how responsible we must be when making representations of things and how, in a sense, abbreviated and distorted and depleted things become when we subject them to our representations. So that idea of the little symbol there is quite significant. Okay, Bryndis. So this was one of the things in this exhibition.

These were a total of 48 individual channels, which were delivering these stories, which had been edited so the pithy bits were there, rather than sort of rambling sort of warming up. But people did become very warmed up in the caravan. They found it very easy to relax and to begin to talk to us about these things. We had these things, these stories being delivered simultaneously on this wall. Sometimes there would be a sort of ocean—it was like a tide of voices and the whole gallery would be full of these voices. Sometimes it would just sort of peter out to one or two. There would be one here, one here, one here.

So you’d be able to walk up to them at any point, even if it was a big clamor, you could walk up to them and pick out an individual voice. Just mind if we get this here. [Video playing].

So I’ll tell you what. We don’t have time for me dwell on that.

Audience: Can I just clarify? Are all of the voices running simultaneously and just going up and down in volume or are they starting and stopping?

Mark Wilson: They’re starting and stopping. So there were a couple of points when it was all the channels were being fully occupied, but you could still go to each individual speaker and actually hear an individual story. Or you could just be overwhelmed by this clamor of voices. But on top of that, for reasons which I probably can’t go into here, but there were also the sound of bats, using an echo detector—sorry, a—

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: Sonar.

Mark Wilson: Sonar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sonar detector. Okay. Then we’d go, du, du, du, du across—they would actually travel across so you’d get this disruptive things, which was the sound of bats moving across the voices. Maybe we can pick it up on questions later, if that’s—

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: I think it’s actually worth talking a bit, in relation to sustainability, because these are all these cycled speakers that we got [laughter], and we took them all out and put them into this wall. It was very interesting in the exhibition that we noticed that the younger generation, younger than us, they’re coming into this show. They would walk up and start to point—to press the thing—

Mark Wilson: The speaker cone. Yeah.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: You just realize that you’ve got this different kind of generation that’s always used to pressing something and something happens.

Mark Wilson: It’s the new museum culture. Yeah.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: [Cross Talk] of these old-fashioned speakers, really.

Mark Wilson: Okay. Very briefly, then, I’m gonna rush on. These were three photographs that we’d taken of the interiors of the pest control office, which was a kind of experience in itself, really. This was an abject space. It was a space in a sense that it wasn’t privileged at all. It was in the basement of the city council office in Morkam. It was dark, dingy, decrepit, neglected, but these guys were fantastic, I mean, they were fantastic raconteurs. The way they told stories was amazing. They had so many stories to tell.

You can imagine there was a lot of humor in these stories, as well, and a lot of incredulity about how people just can’t cope with what actually isn’t a threat at all. So as you can see, it’s quite a big show, quite complex, in the sense that it relies on, I think, there’s about eight, seven components. This was in a text here. If you go to the next slide, yeah, these are a whole series of—there were five sheets of these over a period of time. They were, basically, they were abbreviated forms of reports that had been made to the city council about the presence of foxes in people’s gardens. Just the presence of foxes.

So you get things like, “Den in neighbor’s garden, but fox is spending most of the time in her garden, digging, making mess of plants, etcetera. Scared they will attack. Do not run off if she tries to frighten them away.” You can see that—you start to put these together, and there’s a kind of real sense of nervousness and anxiety about this. “Fox is using garden. Worried about the child and pet dogs.” So these become a bigger and bigger threat. These aren’t edited at all, and there were five sheets of these. “Can’t sleep due to noises fox is making.” The same kinds of things, this idea of noise, this idea of potential contamination.

All sort of, in a sense, adding to people’s anxiety and nervousness. But obviously, which translates to actually neighbors, too, very often. Then another component we had was a video projector onto a kind of screen on the floor. We picked, as Bryndis just sort of pointed out, we picked out one of those texts and actually put it here, which seems to sort of sum this up, this idea of this encroaching presence, sort of coming into garden from woods behind house. It has a kind of—it has a sort of fairytale sort of resonance, which, obviously, is always something that drives the imagination of the nightmare and so on.

Okay. Then there was a set of these enormous cut-outs, which each one was the size of from here to the end of the screen there and which we all stacked up. There’s another dimension here where this is the stamp or the crest of arms for Queensland. The next one, Bryndis. That was because it was a science-specific response within this particular gallery. It was a permanent statue of Albert and Victoria. She imported the red deer to Queensland in 1875 or ’73 or something—’73 and ’74. In ’77, during the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, an image of the animal was added to the Queensland coat of arms.

In recent years, it’s been declared feral, and it’s completely just become uncontrollable. So there’s this, again, there’s this sort of tension between something that was actually intended, put into the different environment, intended to be something, presumably, controllable and aesthetic and decorative and so on, and it becomes this pest which starts destroying stuff. Then, we had a series of talks and a series of seminars where we invited speakers. They were public events. We just teased out a number of questions which arose from the project.

Things like one was called “The Broken Skin,” this idea of being, sort of somehow, infiltrated. There were other sorts of concepts that we sort of used to highlight or title these talks. I wanna talk about this one, as well. This was a spinoff of the Uncertainty project, which is basically we were asked to go into a museum, along with about four or five, six other artists, pick something from the museum, and actually make an installation or a response to it within the context of a group show. We chose these. It was a huge collection of stuff, and actually, it was like a museum collection, rather than the museum itself.

It was just a whole bunch of arbitrary things, historical and so on. We chose these rather sort of sad abject looking ex-decoys, which were used to attract pigeons. They were sort of perished rubber blow-up pigeons. So as part of that, we had them on a wall, just in the box, and we had this radio, which was playing this particular interview we did with a guy in London, who had this fantastic studio. He had 12,000 feet of studio in central London. This guy was not rich. No. He was poor, but he was able to have this studio because it was full of pigeons.

It was the only way—therefore, the fact that he was there was of benefit to the owner, and he’s prepared to put up with the pigeons so that he could have this huge studio space. He talks about this and about his relationship, this sort of symbiotic relationship he has with these pigeons in order that, then, he has this fantastic studio. We made that—this work was just the central work or the central focus, which is this branch, which is covered in these pigeon spikes. These are the spikes that they put on buildings to stop pigeons roosting.

Audience: Looks like an Arizona cactus.

[Laughter]

Mark Wilson: Yeah. It does. Okay. This is how we found them, the pair of rubber decoy pigeons. Then it’s how they were shown on one side, as well. I’m gonna stop there and hand it over to Bryndis.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: I’m gonna rush through this very quickly because we want to give you some opportunity for questions. We talked about we do a lot of long-term projects, and this is something that we did for quite a short time. I just want to show you the sort of differences in our production. This is a project we did for the Gothenburg Biannual, and it of course, it comes out of all this history and all this work that we’re doing. That’s why we were able to do this rather quickly, but it also related to another project that we did. This was called “Three Attempt.” This is a still from a video of this. This is basically it’s actually me, kneeling down at the shore.

On the other side, there was a seal colony. When it started, there was nothing there, and it was me kind of trying to entice the seal and trying to find some kind of way of having some kind of communication with him. I just did everything I could to kind of sing and talk and whistle to—and then, because seals are very curious creatures, they suddenly came, and they were sort of popping in and out of the sea. The picture is just about that. But it made me start to realize this about this whole idea of on whose term is it, anyway? I mean, it’s always on our terms, really.

It’s me who had to come and rolling in the background. It’s me who decided to be there. How can you—can you ever come together and meet another species in a kind of truly equal way? That became quite interesting. So for the biannual, because they wanted us to do a site-specific work, we decided to—the building that they were having the exhibition in was right by the river and into Gothenburg, and it’s got quite a lot of seagulls around. We decided to use the building and go on the roof and try and create a situation in which we would invite seagulls for dinner. So inside, it looked like this.

This is actually—it was a group exhibition, of course, between the biannual and this is our work, how it was within the exhibition space. You could kind of see from this is our work, the three screens here. You could see out onto the river from the windows. But the whole idea was very much also thinking about this, what I said before, that we can’t really do this, and we’re also bringing the camera in and the whole idea about that kind of the relationship the camera has to that kind of meeting. If you go on YouTube, you know the YouTube is full of, also, cute stories about animals and people meeting.

We wanted to try and avoid that. We wanted to try and leave that sort of out of the picture. So we decided and did a lot of thinking about the position of the camera in this whole play, and that we were really not going to allow the camera to be—should there be a direct meeting, be it either cute, aggressive, or whatever, we didn’t want the camera to be exactly necessarily in that moment of that meeting. If you don’t know what I mean, but we had designed this table and it was really important. So the table was supposed to be [inaudible] over the building.

We were eating here or I was eating here, and there was a special place here for the seagulls to eat. There was a space in between, in which we could be negotiating some kind of, yeah, if they wanted to come over or not. So they’re not directly forced. We were going to [inaudible] this over this building, but below was a restaurant, and so you can see at once they weren’t too happy [laughs].

Mark Wilson: I didn’t see the problem, personally.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: So we had to abandon that idea. But then it also—I mean, it was just incredible. We filmed over two-week period in Gothenburg, and apparently, we had the two weeks of sunshine that was in Gothenburg that summer [laughs]. So we got this fantastic—this is kind of me trying to—because they weren’t really on the roof. So there is an enticing that is going on there, and we thought that with the food being put out and the smell, that they would kind of find their way and come and meet us.

Mark Wilson: We took a bit of advice, didn’t we, about what fish to use from—

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: Yeah. We went to local fishermen around and asked them, because there were a lot of seagulls around, we asked them what’s the favorite food of seagulls. We asked the public who feeds the birds down there, we asked them what was the favorite, what they considered the favorite food. So we decided to have this meal because we wanted to have something which was the same for us and the seagull. We decided to have this Swedish dish called Surströmming. We also had bread. Whereas I had my meal cooked, the seagull got theirs raw.

That was the only difference. And I had mine dipped in dill, mustard [laughs]. But anyway, I was sitting there, eating, and kind of finding and trying to see if they would come and if they would possibly be this kind of notion of sharing and sharing of a meal on this particular table. Just show you some still. It was a three screen video work. I’m gonna show you some stills from it. I think I’ll just take this through the end, and then you can—have I forgotten—we can ask questions, really. I think that’s it, then.

[Clapping]