Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork and hands-on experience among taxidermists in the UK and the Netherlands, I will discuss a skilled practice concerned with exploring the boundaries between life and death and between human and non-human animals, predicated on an ambivalent desire to replicate the living body.

Paper long abstract:

Practitioners of taxidermy, the art of arranging skin, claim that their goal in mounting an animal is to make it look natural. Taxidermists are in the business of replicating nature. In order to regain a natural appearance, the dead animal undergoes a process of dismantling at the hands of the expert taxidermist, who removes its flaccid body and replaces it with a form or manikin sculpted from foam or crafted in wood wool. Reference materials are said to be vital during the process of rearranging the skin: these include measurements of the animal's body, photographs of the relevant species, and clues on posture and behaviour from field observation. Moreover, to complement such information, taxidermists take their own body as point of reference, mimicking the magpie's or the squirrel's posture both to get their anatomical bearings and to imagine how the skin would sit if it were animated by a breathing, fleshed-out torso such as their own. Replicating nature, then, entails modelling after life, both non-human and human animal life.

Drawing on fieldwork and hands-on experience among taxidermists in the UK and the Netherlands, I will discuss a skilled practice concerned with exploring the boundaries between life and death and between human and non-human animals, predicated on an ambivalent desire to replicate nature; for in a bid to complicate 'nature', we will consider the nature of the 'natural' model when Artis zoo animals, after a life in captivity, become subject to taxidermy.

Paper short abstract:

Based upon performance ethnography in Hong Kong and London “Becoming Animal in the Chinese Martial Arts” advances beyond the limits of animal or natural metaphor, movement, and myth read as symbolic, rehearsed, or mimicked potentialities, to explore the way embodied understandings of nature unleash hidden skills within the bodies of the practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

Southern Preying Mantis is a Chinese martial art whose practitioners embody movements, skills, and abilities formerly derived from the monastic contemplation of insects, animals, mythological creatures, and plant life encompassed within a framework of Daoism, Buddhism, and Five Element theory—earth, wood, fire, water and metal. Under the glare of eagle eyes martial movements range through mouse, plum-blossom, and unicorn steps, dragon, horse, frog and crane stances, tiger, eagle, and bear claws, alongside leopard, phoenix and ginger fists. The favored weapon is a seven-foot staff twisted like a yellow cow's tongue. Practitioners should move like cats. Fluid arms slither and snake, or swing like an elephant's trunk, or wipe like the forelegs of a fly. Each animal and element possesses special attributes, such as heaviness, stickiness, agility, ferocity, tenacity, pinpoint accuracy, or rapidity. Death strikes lash out with lightning speed towards acupuncture points. Although considered spiritual, the Southern Mantis embodiment of nature is predominantly practical, revealing a complex, sophisticated, and intricate understanding of the human animal. Specifically, the style develops the "hidden powers:" sharp eyesight, strong bones, iron fingers, flexible sinews, and extraordinary strength, trained through sweat, blood and breath. Meditation heightens sensitivity to the enemy's movements, feelings and intentions. Such embodied martial knowledge is taught, harnessed, and developed through a series of increasingly complex partnered training procedures. The practitioner's understanding of the human body, mind, and spirit is reconfigured by the application of training methods, skills, and epistemologies derived from the embodied revelation of hidden natural potentials.

Paper short abstract:

How does fibre enact value? This study is an intervention into how knowledge domains are bounded and how knowledge flows, transfers, is figured and transforms. It is an ethnographic experimentation into, in the first place, the reconfiguration of 'knowledge economies' as 'fibrous value', and secondly, into how 'fibrous value' may be used to destabilize knowledge boundaries like 'artistic' or 'scientific' knowledge practice.

Paper long abstract:

How does fibre enact value? This study is an intervention into how knowledge domains are bounded and how knowledge flows, transfers, is figured and transforms. It is an ethnographic experimentation into, in the first place, the reconfiguration of 'knowledge economies' as 'fibrous value', and secondly, into how 'fibrous value' may be used to destabilize knowledge boundaries like 'artistic' or 'scientific' knowledge practice. This demands tracing the work of fiber and its 'value comparisons' through different situations. The study is based on extended fieldwork in Europe, Central and South America. Woollen fibre is followed as it moves, for instance, through the South American Pampas that nurture the sheep, inside the sample tube in the laboratory where the fibre's quality is determined, and in a private art collection where it appears as a knitted work of art. Field notes are used as 'snap-shot descriptions' for the building up of an anthropological understanding. The study is aimed as a contribution to a discussion on how organic fluid ('natural') materialities might be used as methodological devices to trace how value ontologies are brought into being, co-exist, are maintained or wither away. It further aims to ethnographically flatten any hierarchical order of such co-present ontologies referred to a scientific or artistic which in turn may host assumptions about natural-cultural relations.

Paper short abstract:

A visual artist accompanies an athmospheric scientist on a fieldtrip to Svalbard, where both engage in field practices: sampling, observing, and note taking. In this paper I explore how the natural polar landscape inspires both.

Paper long abstract:

A visual artist accompanies an athmospheric scientist on a fieldtrip to Svalbard, where both engage in field practices: sampling, observing, and note taking. Back in the UK they continue their conversation as they get to work on the 'stuff' - ice samples, air particles, photographs, drawings, prints, and impressions - gathered in the polar field. The scientist engages with an Arctic environment that holds pollutants, a landmass covered in snow to be dug up, melted and filtered. The artist works in an Arctic of expansive vistas, colour hues, textures and stillness. Do scientist and artist craft a different Arctic, or do they engage with the same natural environment in a different way?

In this paper I explore how the natural polar landscape inspires both. Does it bring artist and scientist and their skilled practices together or does it divide them? While their conversations bring out differences in approach, a visit to the scientist's lab and the artist's studio flags up tangible similarities between the two. It is perhaps in this dialogue of work practices where art and science meet. Then what about the Svalbard valley where both spent two weeks observing? Is this a place of work, a subject, or the material they work with? Probably it is all three, comprising a tangible area of common ground.