Interspecies Entanglements: Elsa Brès | Notes for Les Sanglières

 Who are Les Sanglières?

 

They are snuffling. They are trespassing. They are looking foracorns, truffles and insects.

 

It is dark. We are night-blind. For us, as for the hunters who track them through the fields of the Cévennes, Les Sanglières are heard before they are seen. The collective noun in English for wild boars – for Les Sanglières – is “sounder”. These animals sound, they resound, they open our ears to earth-connection. But “sounder” (from Middle English “soundre”) also means “to separate”; to pull apart. Indeed, les sanglières are stationed apart from what is given: from what we know, from what we expect, from what is comfortable. Instead this group of solitary pigs lead us with their noses. If we greet them on their own terms, as Elsa Brés invites us to do, they quickly become unclassifiable: a herd of female singularities [1].

 

“they come out of the woods, they walk on roads, they break fences, they enter cities, they live in intensive corn fields, they bathe in private pools, they eat in garbage cans” — Elsa Brés [2]

 

What do Les Sanglières teach those who track them, and what do their trackers teach us as viewers and listeners, allied to the boars’ own attitude and mode of attention? What does this strange relation between hunter and beast — an "alliance of the excluded” in Slavoj Žižek’s terms [3] — reveal to us about our dominant regimes of exclusion? What do they say of our own abeyance to private property, our complicity with species hierarchy, our investment in the “improvement” of land for extractive-capitalist profit? What do they reveal of our own opting-in to a mode of human exceptionalism that has, over time, framed, farmed and eroded our relations with wild boar into “resource”, or “pest”, or “invasive”—species types that we then feel compelled to control to a point of non-existence? And what might these singular pigs and the working class hunters who reach deep into their worlds have to tell us about our own internal sanglièrs …of our potential disobedience, our feral edges, our paradoxical status as human-animals?

 

Be patient, open your ears, read and re-assemble the signs into a new regime of sense. A sense that is hewn to the land, that is attuned to the language of Les Sanglières. 

 

This language is material. Meaning is traced on the ground in the image of scuffs, scents, bust-open gates and the negative imprint of trotters. Les Sanglières trample the fences and boundaries of ancient and contemporary enclosure, and the spaces they open up grant us permission to do the same. In this way they chart the path for both hunter and filmmaker to reclaim temporary access. We are tracking our way along alternative routes, towards withheld sources of nourishment. We are drawn by a taste of what we once knew as the commons.

This is a film that treats capture—both the capture of footage and the hunters’ capture of wild boar—as something other than extraction: as a leaning in, a yielding to, and then a pause and a pivot that throws us back upon ourselves. And, as a filmic embrace of that which we nonetheless cannot comprehensively capture or control (and therefore of that which instead captures us) Les Sanglières is paradoxical, restless and elusive [4]. As such, Les Sanglières is a proposal for film itself: for a mode of filmmaking thateats away at its own boundaries, like Manny Faber’s “termite art”

 

[5], tracking and yielding and nibbling its way beyond its own prior assumptions, and beyond the “private hunting reserves” of textual authority and the clarity of human language [6]. This is a trickster- reading of our contemporary relationship to land. A “reading-as- poaching” that gestures towards new modes of signification; new(old) ways of knowing that are, quite literally, boar-ish: Stubborn, responsive, outlandish, female, planetary.

 

Footnotes:
[1] Les Sanglières is Elsa Brès' own invented term, which stands both for a female-led group of wild boars and also for the humans that side with these boars. As Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou explains, "the title riffs on an attempt toward redress, a desire for change: les sanglières means “female boars” in French, feminizing the male
term les sangliers, yet the term technically does not exist in the  French language". (X-TRA, Vol. 26 No.1, 2024)

 

[2] Elsa Brés in conversation with Dorothy Yamamoto, “Notes for Les Sanglières”: https://ddaoccitanie.org/en/artists/elsa-bres/highlights/elsa-bres-notes-for-les-sanglieres

 

[3] Slavoj Zizek (2009) In Defense of Lost Causes. New York: Verso.

 

[4] Laura Cooper, Grid, net, snare, screen: Translating human-animal relationships in artist moving image, PhD thesis,
forthcoming.

 

[5] José Luis Guarner (2014), “Introduction to White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art and Other Writings on Film”, DOCUMENTS Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, Vol. II No. 4, 2014.

 

[6] Michel de Certeau (1984) “Reading as Poaching” in The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Interspecies Entanglements is a programme of films made by contemporary artists, that interrogate the tensions and possibilities of the human-animal relationship from a range of different perspectives and cultural contexts. The programme foregrounds how artists are working to reimagine more ethical relations with nonhuman animals through interdisciplinary modes of practice. With a focus on expanded  performance methodologies, it positions artistic practice as a meaningful site through which to enact more affirmative animal relations. From an intersectional and inclusive perspective, the programme aims to address how animal oppression overlaps with other forms of contemporary oppression in capitalist-colonial contexts. These complex entanglements are elaborated by scholars and artists invited to enter into dialogue with the films through newly commissioned texts. 

 

This programme is curated by Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp and kindly supported by the Culture and Animals Foundation.