A Weak & Panicked Animal |
by Jake Starr
AU, 2024, 12 min
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/non-human territories and our response to infringements upon such anthropocentric constructs. Employing Anna Tsing’s concept of contamination, these often violent encounters can be seen to fundamentally undermine and transform our relational position with the natural world. Conventional boundaries between human and other are literally and metaphorically shattered, as these meek creatures shatter the glass panes which prohibit the natural world from entering our human sanctuaries. There is a danger, spontaneity, unfamiliarity and unpredictability foreign to the experience of urbanised human life, an eruption of the real experienced with great affect by those that encounter such interspecies intrusions. Through these encounters 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.