How to Talk with Birds, Trees, Fish, Shells, Snakes, Bulls and Lions

The exhibition started from a conversation between late Senegalese artist Issa Samb and the trans-disciplinary artist Antje Majewski. That conversation triggered an ongoing process of research which brought Majewski to look for comparison with colleagues from Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, France, Hungary, Poland, and Senegal, inviting them also to contribute with their own works. “How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions” is the result of this ongoing investigation upon the relationship between human and “beyond-human” and is conceived to function as a laboratory in motion.

The works selected count videos, large-scale installations, sculptures, manifestos, poems, photographs, drawings, and paintings, which express their creators’ concerns with endangered places, societies and environments. The artistic positions in question place themselves on a dissident point of view in respect to today’s dominant modes of interaction with the environment, proposing on the contrary new ways of acting within the delicate socio-ecological systems, of which humans are also part.