A Weak & Panicked Animal, 2024 4K video on loop, construction fence, child safety straps, aluminium bench, lego, power cords, TV screen. Video 12min, installation 210 x 240 x 100cm

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The Nameless Black of a Name, 2024 laser Etched OSB. 86 x 50cm

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A Weak & Panicked Animal, film poster

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Exhibition text by Harry de Vries


… Eventually, this would require a conspiracy between the anonymous materials of the planet and their partisan agent on the inside, a host so embedded in the ragged fabric of late capitalism that they are indistinguishable as a security threat.


It cannot begin just anywhere; the host itself requires an environment prone to counter-infection, already ragged with decay; an immunocompromised city, comforted by its own environmentalist LARP, somewhere at the inconsequential limits of the world. Make the individual host there seemingly docile enough to be permitted access to more sophisticated aesthetic training, where a fugue-state of university largesse induces an unhealthy familiarity with the biological abject. After years of spiralling around the point, they should fall wholeheartedly into contemporary, defanged, post humanist discourse, where terms like ‘infection’ and ‘dehumanisation’ are raised but never embodied.

Eventually a ‘chance’ encounter (activation code) triggers the sequence of events for which the host has unwittingly been trained. They will coalesce a parasitic point of view by reanimating scrap footage of security cameras, bodycams. Everything comes from somewhere else: the voice is not the host’s own. It imitates, like a lyrebird or the bear from Annihilation. Echoes. Taunts. This is a documentary with no host and no camera. It has formed with all the idiosyncrasies of natural selection. The planet has no mouth, but it evolved a way to scream.

It screams in laser sights on writhing hide; tufts of fur matted by blood to shattered windows; the ringing of cloven hooves on lino floors. This torturous speech is inelegant, almost unintentional, like the first few words of a new language, but this is why it is poetry; the familiar made alien makes us see the familiar as new again. It would have been most effective as a kind of early warning, and perhaps the planet would have had time to sophisticate their speech enough to negotiate. Unfortunately, evolution only happens after the fact; the infection is already dangerously progressed and becoming resistant to less invasive treatments.

A warning which comes too late must function as a threat.

In their increasingly infrequent moments of distinction from the planetary organism, the host will remember that dehumanisation, infection, and disorientation are as useful to the terrorist as the post-humanist.

Eco-horror.

Eco-terror …

Shown at Syrup Contemporary

11 May - 1 June 2024


Within the ordered infrastructures of human civilisation, society endeavors to minimise the existential uncertainties of human survival to a minimum. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing - each serve as a boundary, a tacit agreement between the human and non-human world: a contract stipulating that neither shall cross these thresholds without becoming subject to the law of the other. These spatial and symbolic thresholds represent an attempt to contain nature, to insulate ourselves from its unpredictable vitality.


A Weak & Panicked Animal (2024) gathers an unsettling archive of CCTV footage, police body-camera recordings and local news reports depicting encounters between wild deer and human settlements. These images, charged with unease, confusion and often violence, form a portrait of territory in crisis. As the matrix of popular media mediates our conceptions of nature and civilisation, it can also disrupt them, revealing the porosity of borders between human and non-human realms and the fragility of the anthropocentric systems we rely on to assert control over the natural world.


Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of “contamination” - the idea that interspecies encounters inevitably alter and destabilise our relation to the natural world - these deer become agents of disruption. Their presence forces a collision between the contradictory forces of constructed order and ecological spontaneity. As they breach the material and symbolic fortifications of human society - shattering storefront glass, storming school halls, thrashing through offices - the illusion of a clear division between human society and the wilds of nature is violently dissolved.


What emerges from these confrontations is not merely spectacle, but a moment of ontological rupture. These animals - often perceived through the matrix of media as gentle, passive, picturesque - become emissaries of an ecological will to power which refuses to be contained. In their panic and confusion, we see reflected our own vulnerability, precarity and ultimately, our utter entanglement within an ecosystem we have fooled ourselves into believing we have mastered.


A Weak & Panicked Animal asks what happens when the margins of the wild breach the heart of civilisation, when systems of surveillance and security fail to uphold the fantasy of human dominion and we are confronted with the primal apathy of nature. In doing so, the work reveals how deeply human civilisation depends on denial: denial of contingency, denial of interdependence, denial of the fact that no matter how sterile or secure our human bastions become, they are still enmeshed in a planetary ecosystem indifferent to the whims of humankind.

Using Format