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


Enclosed by a civilised landscape, society reduces the problem of human survival to a minimum. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing, demarcate a treaty between man and nature whereby neither one of us shall pass these thresholds lest we become subject to the law of the other. Collating an archive of CCTV, police body-cam footage and local news reports documenting urban confrontations with wild deer, A Weak & Panicked Animal (2024) considers the precarious borders between human and non-human territories and our response to infringements upon entrenched anthropocentric conventions. Through the framework of Anna Tsing’s concept of contamination, these often-violent encounters can be understood to fundamentally undermine and transform our pre-existing relations with the non-human world. In these encounters we witness an eruption of the real, experienced with great affect by those confronted by these interspecies intrusions. The spatial order of civilisation and wilderness is literally and metaphorically shattered as these deer burst through the very glass panes designed to keep the unruly forces of nature separate from our human sanctuaries. The deer, symbolic of natural purity, embodies a wildness now foreign and certainly unwelcome to the experience of urbanised human life. When confronted by such wild beasts within our civilised landscapes we are shocked, fearful, unsure of how to appropriately respond to such unexpected proximity with this non-human other. Witnesses scramble for cover in a panicked flight, law enforcement officers struggle to apprehend animal intruders, wildlife protection services draw their weapons and legal professionals lay out appropriate charges. Our response to these non-human visitations lays out the absurdity of anthropocentric constructs and our inadequacy in addressing the inextricable reality that we too, are animals in a chaotic planetary ecosystem. We are reminded that our colonies of sterility, our institutions of control and our conditions of social order, do not divorce us from the wild’s will to power.

Using Format