TREE MUSEUM
NEAR DWELLERS
& THE SHARING OF BREATH
SLQS & SPIRIT OF SAIGON
TREE MUSEUM
coming soon: podcast of panel discussion with Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp and SLQS
Sarah Le Quang Sang, aka SLQS, and her film, Walking Together, opened Near Dwellers, our ongoing inquiry on human and animal relationships. Her film provocatively and poetically situates us in the midst of a walk with rider and horse as they move through the interstitially urban lands of Walthamstow Marshes, in London, United Kingdom. However, this walk is not a performance of equestrian mastery over one of the most iconic animals in human culture. Instead, SLQS draws us into a meditation on the very essence of our connection to other beings. The simple, but often missed, act of breathing together is presented as a kind of prayer of sorts, not only to the Marshes as host and provider, but also to the very possibility of her and horse’s ability to traverse the Earth – breathing together, listening together, moving together in unison. SLQS immerses us in this intimate communion through her utterance of a mantra:
Breathing in: We are walking together this Earth;
Breathing out: This Earth that holds us;
In: Walking together;
Out: The Earth that holds us…
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SLQS poignantly reminds us of our place on Earth with its teeming multitude of life forms, and the plain reality of our shared journey: that we share the air as it invisibly loops in and out of all bodies, repeating with every heartbeat.
But the film also raises questions that go unanswered: We are directed to watch horse and rider from an aerial perspective and made to inhabit that imperial gaze as they traverse the section of land that we come to see as a map: a patchwork of fields, cut through with train tracks, power lines, well-trodden pathways hemmed in by industrial buildings, roadways and urban settlements. The Marshes are scarred with the markers of human management and control, of human-animal hierarchies and the surveilled body, and like a specter, the unspoken politics of England’s horse culture – its wealth and privilege – lurks as we listen and watch. SLQS’s film draws us into a contemplation on how a relationship with an animal can, at one and the same time, help us appreciate our shared existence with other beings, while also remaining entangled in the social and political burdens of our time.
Walking Together is created by SLQS in collaboration with Bilal Singh and Spirit of Saigon.
SLQS is a Franco-Vietnamese artist living in East London. Her practice researches the politics of space and who is excluded from it. SLQS makes and holds space as a woman, a person of mixed heritage, a foreigner, a mother, an artist and an equestrian. She invites her audience to decolonise spatial orders from imperialist, sexist and racist structures.
Her practice is multi-disciplinary spanning from performance, live art, photography, video and screen printing. She also works as producer, curator and workshop leader.
SLQS graduated with distinction from MA Performance Making at Goldsmiths University of London. She presented work at MOMA Machynlleth, Totally Thames, Spitalfields Music, Rich Mix, Procreate Project, the Live Art Development Agency, the Royal College of Art, the Brunel Museum, the Migration Museum, the Attenborough Art Centre, the Science Gallery and the University of Lincoln. She is currently a member of the New Artist Collective and Creative Think Tank at UK New Artists.
@SLQSstudio / SLQSstudio.com
PANEL DISCUSSION
Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp
On September 9th, 2023, the Tree Museum and Street Road Artists' Space co-hosted the first of our series of Near Dwellers Panel Discussions with Sarah Le Quang Sang (SLQS) and scholar Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp. They spoke about how their work rethinks animal-human relationships through the lens of performance art.
SLQS presented her film Walking Together that provocatively and poetically situated us in the midst of a walk with rider and horse as they move through the interstitially urban lands of Walthamstow Marshes, in London, United Kingdom. Her film draws us into a meditation on the very essence of our connection to other beings and opened-up opportunities for us to reflect on interspecies intimacy.
Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp introduced us to her research on how performance artists trouble assumptions of a purported human-animal divide. Her work considers the ethics of interspecies practice in contemporary art and performance, with a particular focus on animals and the deep entanglement of contemporary oppressions, and the role that artists take in “Becoming-with-Animal” in the context of wider eco-feminist politics.
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Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp is a British creative producer, curatorial assistant and PhD researcher in the field of contemporary art and performance at the University of Surrey.
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For more information about Florence see: https://www.flofitzgerald.com