Interspecies Entanglements: Esther van der Heijden and Nosh Neneh | Living Monuments of The Deep

What if art was the most effective (and affective) way to engage with marine animals and reflect on inter-species relationships ? In Living Monuments of the Deep, Esther van der Heijden and Nosh Neneh invite us to meet spiky, rough and crawling bodies in a dry and infinite landscape. This allows us to witness marine life not only as endangered species, but as bodies that defy the modern conception of the individual. The "living monuments" here remind us how animal life, just like human life, is always part of its ecosystem, and the way we dress, move and breathe only has meaning because of the umwelt we evolve in. The  "absurd" forms of echinoderms or mollusks only surprise us because we tend to think bodies as independent entities that need to stand up and dissociate from their environment in order to exist. But this work forces us to remember how our skin, fluids and existences always stick to the world. 

 

What if pure autonomy was a liberal lie? Living Monuments of the Deep invites us to experience the uncomfortableness of watching the slow movement of such creatures, it confronts us with our estrangement to those queer forms of life. These images echo the recent work of artists who also engage with echinoderms in a political way, including Camille Soualem in France who becomes a starfish in her performance The collective strategy of starfishes which ends with this poem:  

 

Our defense mechanisms are our bodies, spikes, teeth, 

Stinging mucous membranes, camouflage, and disconcerting passivity. 

Being speechless is our destiny. 

We spring from places where we are not expected. 

We form star clouds, 

With complex identities, 

And walk through narrow alleys, 

Abolishing borders. 

 

Just like Esther van der Heijden and Nosh Neneh, Camille Soualem shows here what those bizarre forms of life teach us: not resilience but transformation, not identity but multiplicity, not motion but stillness. All of those directions are politically relevant in a time where rigid forms and entities dominate the political landscape : ecologically, the proposition is rooted in a love for fluidity and stickiness. As the transfeminist philosopher Eva Hayward told us (2008), there are still “more lessons [to learn] from a starfish".

 

Myriam Bahaffou