Natascha Nanji

This project began with a speculation, what conditions would be required to become an animal or a plant for a short period of time? As a starting point, it was a place to consider the possibilities that entail living through another pair of eyes, feeling with another nervous system, an intensely sympathetic state perhaps? Questions ventured out: what are potentialities of transforming into another species? What is it to write of this in a time of war and extinction? 

Telling stories about living through the midst of chaos, "in the middle of the glorious mess that is the actual world" (Massumi: 2014), is at the heart of this project. Stories were recounted to me by artists and practitioners, others came about whilst unravelling artworks. 

Three essays propose language as instigations. Gliding with the ubiquitous goldfish, from myth to methodology by way of metaphor, is a means of asking how language can move us through uncertainties. Along the way are adjustments, re-seeing the world, re-focusing through other eyes; Amerindian perspectivism sets the foundation for shaking and re-knowing what we think to be true. And communications between humans, our environment, and nonhuman beings are retold; translating these relations are where transformations occur — incomplete and leaky — inciting frictional entanglements that in turn, require a translation of our selves.

How much hope must we pour into language for it to finally devour that which we desire? If sci-fi writers have been prophetic in visualising the dystopic reality we find ourselves living through, surely we can can conceive of a future in which we are flourishing alongside of, not instead of, or at the cost of others?