Fevered Sleep’s Sheep Pig Goat.

Abstract

Last year, Sheep Pig Goat – a project by the UK-based company Fevered Sleep, was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection as part of their year-long Making Nature program which explored the relationship between perception and knowledge in human-animal relationships, along with all the attendant issues of mastery, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism inevitably raised by the human production of knowledge about animals. Described by the company as a ‘creative research studio’, Sheep Pig Goat involved a week-long public presentation of ‘a series of improvised encounters between human performers and animal spectators’: specifically, some sheep, pigs and goats. Originally, the idea was to make a performance for an animal audience staged in the galleries at the Wellcome. But gradually the company moved away from this towards plans for a project which would offer human visitors what director, David Harradine describes as a space in which to “properly, respectfully and carefully observe animals watching a performance and reflect and report back on what they’ve seen, whether it’s the body language of a pig or a goat” For Harradine: “humans do a really bad job of paying attention’, and so the project was conceived as giving both the company and a wider public the opportunity to attend to animals, but also to attend to animals as themselves engaged in processes of attending, rather than as the mere objects of human observation.”