Animal-Woman Journey(s)

13 Sep 2024

Happening On 19/09/2024

Audio-visual installation with durational performance by Roksana Niewadzisz. Granary Theatre, Lancaster Quay, Cork T12 VF64. Viewing open Thursday 19th and Friday 20th of September 2024 between 2pm and 5 pm

Project Summary 

Animal-Woman Journey(s): Posthuman embodiment of zoomorphic folk tales by  Roksana Niewadzisz.

Diverse folktales passed down across the generations in different languages tell of Seal Women, Selkies, Mermaids, Dove Girls, She-Wolves, Swan Women: all zoomorphic or semi-zoomorphic beings able to remove their animal coats or skins and take on human shape. Liminal creatures capable of transformation, they embrace the wild and the civilized, animal and human, aquatic, aerial and terrestrial, natural and supernatural, archetypal and individual. They have the ability to move between worlds. Across a vast range of stories, these creaturely women are deprived of their animal skin, they lose their integrity and ability to transform and thus are doomed to incompleteness, foreignness, otherness and longing. They get “stuck” in human form and are forced to function according to imposed human rules. They are trapped somewhere between subject and object, “I” and “Other”, between their body and its image.

These tales became a rich territory for performative exploration of the normalized processes of oppression underpinning both human exceptionalism and the environmental crises associated with the Anthropocene, as well as compelling alternative formulations of our relational co-existence with non-human others and “othered” humans. This project re-imagines these tales, not as warnings to instruct women to behave, but as sites of remembrance, mourning and even liberatory enactment of other ways of being.

Once upon a time…