To cross public space and streets with one's body is a right and a privilege. To take to the streets with placards and declarations, to collectivize one's apocalypse, to live in a center where there are alternative gathering places that one can inhabit: all this has shaped my pool of ideas and beliefs, in which I have taken refuge in the relentless desire to build a world other than the one we have been handed. A marginal world that, as bell hooks recalls in one of the essays that make up Elogio del margine, edited by Maria Nadotti, becomes «a place of radical possibility, a space of resistance».
On the margins of this world, I met the animals.
The first encounter was mediated through the lens of visual practices and so-called socially engaged art. In particular, it took place at RAVE East Village Artist Residency, a metaproject conceived by artists and activists Isabella Pers and Tiziana Pers, which comes to life in another, alternative, utopian space where artists and the people who pass through it – curators, scientists, philosophers architects – are guests in a sanctuary where animals rescued from slaughter or other exploitative situations live through the lens of Art_History, an ongoing practice of Tiziana Pers, an artist and activist for whom paintings become openings to the other and pivots of political struggle in public space.
During Nada Prlja's residency, of which this article aims to offer a fleshed-out account, it happened that in Sairano, in the province of Pavia, nine pigs (Crusca, Bartolomeo, Carolina, Crosta, Spino, Pumba, Dorothy, Ursula, and Mercoledì) were brutally killed inside a shelter for rescued animals called Progetto Cuori Liberi (Free Hearts Project). The abuse of power perpetuated by the police against the last ones, the animals, expanded to the voices and bodies of the activists present at the site, who wanted to prevent the ASL from entering the sanctuary. By shedding light on the intersectionality between the different forms of oppression and domination, a central assumption of Tiziana Pers's research, the artist created 9 portraits, one for each pig, which were taken to the square during the demonstrations following the event. In doing so, she participated at the demonstrations in Milan and Rome through the presence of other people active in the places of interest. This engraving aims to bring out an existing synchronicity, looking at and recognizing each other: the portrait series Hands Off Sanctuaries! Sairano, Italy 20/09/2023 shares with the work Prlja developed for RAVE not only a temporal contingency but also the empowerment of a denied and suppressed, erased and hidden voice, which reappropriates a collective space and comes to life through a community of interspecies kinship.
In the rural context of RAVE, in a village in eastern Friuli, Nada Prlja's site-specific public art project entitled I was born to fly – an installation already presented in its most embryonic form on the occasion of the exhibition AAA Animal Among Animals. Towards the world to come, curated by Gabi Scardi and RAVE – has come into being during Prlja's residency, inserts itself into a marginal space, occupying its interstices: the holes in the trees, the old tanks where the fish waited for death, the narrow pigsty; returning to life in a suspended time, posthumous to the action.
Prlja's practice over the years has looked critically and militantly at contemporary social and political issues, such as nationalism, human rights, and migration. Interwoven with this discourse is her method of site-specific work, in which the territory becomes the material of fluid and liminal experimentation where works happen. In the intersection with specific locations and communities, her research is situated in a public and politicized time and space. Prlja crosses the border, the margins of humanity, occupying a space that is never neutral but is entwined with relationships determined by the social context, the experience of places, and the people who inhabit them. In crossing these remnants of the world – to adopt Gilles Clément's beloved definition of residual space, understood by the author as a place deriving from the progressive abandonment of anthropic activities – his research is marked by the use of different media, chosen accordingly to the peculiarities of each project, ranging from installation-based research to performances, and even touching on more traditional media such as drawing, painting,
and sculpture.
With I was born to fly she relates to animality – understood in the Derridean sense of the animality of animals, for which the philosopher coined the French term animot – crossing the threshold of anthropocentrism, bringing his gaze closer to other existences, to the breath that unites non human and human animals. To do so, through the absence as a generator of meaning, she gives life to a destabilizing presence: a multitude of animals, including cows, lobsters, chickens, horses, pigs, and mice, used in the meat industry, fishing, fashion, entertainment or for experimentation; and she regain possession of the language, the line of demarcation of thought that marked the separation between Homo Sapiens and all other animals, as if these could be seen as an indistinct whole. Prija recalls their plural being, and their personal needs as individuals belonging to different species, inviting a change of perspective and listening.
Help me.
Do not eat me.
We don’t want to gain weight so fast.
I do not want to be part of your hormone replacement therapies.
I want to be able to turn around to see my children.
I want to live more than 42 days.
I am not the one for your toxicological experiments.
Do not wash my eyes with pesticides and detergents.
I was born to fly.
Imagining the end of a multi-species demonstration, Prlja has created a series of oil-painted signs, where the above inscriptions can be read, adapting the size of the signs to the animal associated with each statement. The use of the placard as an object of political revolt decontextualized from its context had already been taken up by Prlja in Stop the War Against Immigrants I, an installation presented on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at the SC gallery in Zagreb, where, however, the placards appeared broken, fragmented. The word, in both cases, becomes an instrument of self-consciousness and re-appropriation of one's political subjectivity and, in the case of the words spoken by animals, takes back the space of existence to resist the anthropocentric paradigm. To preside over the margin becomes materialized through the use of multiple languages: English, Italian, Friulian, and Slovenian. Interspecies boundaries are intertwined with geographical, cultural, and identity boundaries, which hold a plurality of lives together rather than dividing them, in the idea that none is worth more than another.
This text refers to the theories of Gilles Clément, Jacques Derrida, and bell hooks.
Nada Prlja’s residency at RAVE East Village Artist Residency took place in October 2023