Catalust: Performing love, desire, yearning and care as an ecopolitical re-enfranchisement of the non-human (NSFW)
The animal world photo essay was particularly powerful in its sensitive curation of a visual commentary of chimeric human/non-human hybridity. Rachele Totaro's photographs of rescued laboratory rats and mice were particularly evocative for me, and inspired my conceptualisation of these types of human and non-human relationships, and their representation, as a 'catalust' for meditative eco-cosmopolitanism and proactive eco-political change.
In this manner, love and care can inspire a cross-species empathy and trans-corporeal sensitivity that is at once individual in its intimacy and global in its implications. Global in the sense that a single successful interaction demonstrates the possibility of human to non-human bonding and relations, perhaps to inspire - and have awareness of - the potential for many more. An obvious word-play with the term catalyst, I suggest that catalust demonstrates similar qualities to its linguistic derivative; in that a sense of catalust inspires and enables more readily future reactions without the original feeling of love being negated in the process. In light of Rosi Braidotti's nuanced pursuit of "sustainable becoming", a theme in many her texts, catalust offers "a humble kind of hope, rooted in the ordinary micro-practices of everyday life" ('Transpositions...' 278). If ecological thinking was encouraged, and as natural as falling in love, how could this change human narratives and perspectives in respect to it?
Pony Express, an Australian-American art duo, model the potentiality of a form of catalust in their 2016 performance installation 'Ecosexual Bathhouse'. In a meditative and excitingly immersive environment, Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair draw upon the 'Ecosex Manifesto' (2011) of Annie Sprinkle and Dr. Elizabeth Stephens to ask, how would we treat the Earth differently if it were our lover? Harnessing the marketing adage of "sex sells", the pair orchestrate a participatory, eco-erotic environment that visualises sexy ecosystems and the ease of natural co-habitation. Having experienced this work myself when it was part of the Liveworks Program in 2016 (at Carriageworks, Redfern), I can vouch for the success of its provocative albeit quirky conceptualisations; you leave the room with a powerfully diffuse sense of your own physical boundaries. View the trailer of their performance installation here.
Perhaps therefore, it is through love that humans can develop what Braidotti conceives as "simple strategies to hold, sustain and map out thresholds of sustainable transformation" (Transpositions 278), wherein our human contexts become even more explicitly and joyously entangled with those that we share with the non-human.
Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Polity, 2006.
Sprinkle, Annie & Elizabeth Stephens, Ecosexual Manifesto. Personal website publication, 2011 (updated 2015). https://theecosexuals.ucsc.edu/ecosexualmanifesto/
'Eco-Sexual Bathhouse', 2016, performance installation, variable dimensions.
Artists and Creators: Pony Express (Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair)
Creative Producer: Sarah Rowbottam
Production Manager: Emily O’Brien
Performers: Scarlett O’Claire, Bhenji Ra
Artists and Creators: Pony Express (Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair)
Creative Producer: Sarah Rowbottam
Production Manager: Emily O’Brien
Performers: Scarlett O’Claire, Bhenji Ra
- Bridget
