Anthropomorphic Trouble

in collaboration with artist Goda Palekaitė,
research project with multiple outcomes: book, video, lecture-performance, installation

– research residency with Art Catalyst, Sheffield, UK (March – November 2021)
– performance at Whitechapel gallery, London (20. 11 and 21. 11. 2021), within the program Ways of Knowing: Earth/Matter
– exhibited at Nemuno 7, Kaunas (22. 5 – 29. 6. 2022), within the exhibition Fluid bodies
– exhibited at tranzit.sk, Bratislava (21. 9. 2022 – 27. 1. 2023), within the exhibition I as it, or stones that vibrate

Anthropomorphic trouble wants to tackle the complexity of the entanglements between the humans and the Earth. Without solving the trouble, by importing cosmologies, technologies and practices from other times, it searches for the associative joints between different modes of knowing. The perception of time is in motion – it transforms through encounters with texts, stones, animals and other humans. In this way, Anthropomorphic Trouble proposes its own learning structure and involvement with the environment that accounts not only for historical, scientific and cultural, but also personal experiences.

Locality and Correlations were important measurements of this project. We worked where we found ourselves and followed those that we encountered. Because if She is round, you can descend towards Her core from any point on the surface. The research that started in our heads situated in Brussels, later travelled to places like the Jurassic coastline and Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset, Arts Catalyst office in Sheffield, Nikola’s Tesla museum in Belgrade, Delfina residency and Whitechapel gallery in London, various museums of natural history, zoos and aquariums throughout Europe, mammoth grave in rural Serbia, and Montenegrin mountains. Ethnographic fieldwork methodology was definitely an influence but equally so were associative relations between what is here and now. We threw ourselves into certain time, space and conditions, and learned from there. We ate vigorously, we didn’t refuse. We allowed research to define itself and to select for us. Its intensity, its velocity was the material for thought, for text, for film, for conversation. Following Bruno Latour, there exists only local and temporal views since no one sees the Earth globally and no one comprehends a system from Nowhere.

Performance
Anthropomorphic Trouble
by Goda Palekaitė and Adrijana Gvozdenović
Whitechapel gallery, London (20. 11 and 21. 11. 2021) 

The public encounter aimed to open the possibility to experience and discuss anthropomorphic troubles, as we share our research, stories and works developed in the past two years. Looking at the transitional moments within the history of science and questioning the scientific museological display, we invited audience to spend time with the bodies of stones, view a video from the fieldwork portraying non-human protagonists, and engage with the history of Earth in a tactile way – in other words, to exercise our gaze and touch for a different knowledge of landscape and time. 

Documentation of a two-day performance over the 20 – 21st November at Whitechapel Gallery for the good neighbour – www.thegoodneighbour.lt, by the artist Johnston Sheard.