‘my bovine heart’ is a practice-based research project that investigates the potential for contemporary performance practice to engage with the moral dilemma of ‘meat culture’. It consists of a solo theatrical performance that addresses the question of ‘cowness’ through the interplay of text, image and sound within a postdramatic framework and an exegesis that discusses the paradox of attempting to speak for the animal subject through performance languages. Framed by Feminist Care Theory, this research addresses the question, is it possible to (re)present the animal with care? It argues that the artist (carer) must focus their practice (labor) on attending to the animal (cared for) sympathetically, bearing witness to animal suffering, in the co-presence of the audience to avoid replicating the power structure implicit in ‘meat culture’. This research is fundamentally informed by my practice as a Sydney based theatre maker over two decades, exploring political issues thr
Ireland
Sydney
New-south-wales
Australia
Irish
Matthew-herbert
Kira-oreilly
Feminist-care-theory
One-pig
Kirao-reilly
Josephine-donovan
Abstract
This article uses the history of an unrealized technology to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of human’s capacity to technologically master their environments. Drawing on archival and published sources, I detail the history of the bioregenerative life-support system, a system in which simple organisms most commonly algae would inhabit the spacecraft and, through a series of interspecies symbioses, maintain cabin conditions and sustain astronaut life. By homing in on the maintenance practices of the system and taking seriously the kinds of interspecies possibilities they would have engendered, this account does the work of recovering how the history of American spaceflight as we know it today was not at all inevitable, and in fact it could well have been a thoroughly multispecies affair. At the same time, by offering an exaggerated example of the ways astronauts during space travel were (and are) in
Berkeley
California
United-states
Russia
Salisbury
Mashonaland-east
Zimbabwe
Woman
Hiroshima
Japan
America
Soviet