Radical Multispecies Utopias: Artistic Cohabitation and Collaboration with Other Animals

Engaged contemporary art is expected to irritate, to criticise the status quo, to question norms, to denounce systematic injustices, and to constantly create new, experimental codes of its own. Art is therefore an ideal playground for utopian speculations and proposals. It always finds new ways to give form to utopian imaginations and thus envision a radical reorganisation of the world. This could be, for example, a post-anthropocentric, solidarity-driven multispecies society in which animals are full members, one that recognises animal individuality, animal agency, and animal interests and needs.

Art’s creative capacity to lend shape to thought experiments will be discussed primarily on the basis of two focal points: on the one hand, human-animal cohabitation projects and artistic microsanctuaries are presented as already implemented utopias. On the other, we explore approaches to aesthetic animal-human collaboration or animal aesthetics to envision how animals can be recognised as agents in their world-building capabilities. In both cases, the emancipatory potential only unfolds when animals are involved as equal co-creators of shared spaces and practices. Art can then transcend its traditional role as a commentator and catalyst of social animal-human relations and become an activist and proliferator of better futures with a world-altering impact. Art demonstrates that utopias do not necessarily have to be projected into a distant future or a remote corner of the world: they are possible in the here and now.

Jessica Ullrich is currently teaching art studies and aesthetics at the University of Fine Arts Münster and is a guest lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her research interests include animal-human relationships in the arts and aesthetics. She is editor of Tierstudien, the first academic journal for animal studies in Germany, and was a representative of the transdisciplinary network Minding Animals Germany from 2012 to 2021.
 

The lecture is part of the dialogue series "Sniffing Conversations" of the Interspecies Art Hub, curated by Lisa Jäger, Lena Lieselotte Schuster and Eva Seiler.

With kind support by City of Vienna