CONTACT ZONE is an essay performance-intervention on, about, beside, around, overlapped, near and counter Donna Haraway's essay "Where the species meet". It is composed by a first part that is a surrealist cut-up created by the artist with a bunch of labradors in an immanent "becoming-with"; a second part where the protagonist trains to become-labrador with different techniques and a third de-constructive-re-constructive critique that puts into light the dark bio-political dimension of biocapitalism to form an impure superposition of many planes. The artistic approach is not ideological but feels and problematically elaborates Haraway's "contact zone" in its multidimensional "natureculture" impurity. In the "contact zone" Marx's transcendent commodification (exchange value and use value) meets the immanent "encounter value" that unmakes any transcendent judgment. An ambiguous zone of feeling is triggered that anticipates language, categories of sense and cognitive definitions. The artist encounters a bunch of playful labradors so much as Haraway's book does. The whole event is not only a place for interspecies meeting but also for literary commentaries and artistic derives. Haraway's book becomes a material art object with signs of bites and torn pages scattered all over in pieces; some pages eaten with obsessive rage and some licked with aimless love . It is a spinning tour de force of many dimensions, intensities and meta-dimensions in play. The artist (that calls himself Anartist) becomes part of an indefinite and creative "contact assemblage" with the potentiality to unleash a humanimal performing expression that can overcome art as a too much anthropocentric human affair. Is this humanimal performing assemblage a new path for the artistic vanguard? Does a new humanimal territory is open for the artistic research? The video was shown in DIVENIRE ANIMALE, an exhibition held in Grosseto's Galleria Medicea 15 July-15 August 2022. The exhibition is part of the wider research project Humanimal Community Art Project.

Self-interview with Gian Luigi Biagini

Can you talk about your art practice?

I have spent much of my life in highly professional advertising and design studios in Rome. When I was 40 years old I broke up my nerves and went to live in Helsinki. However I had already prepared a line of flight by doing marginal exhibitions in Rome and other places in Italy as a parallel activity to my creative profession. I have been experimenting with many media before leaving for Helsinki in 2011: video-performances, short-movies, paintings (action painting, conceptual, art brut), drawings, installations, experimental writing and a mix of everything. When I arrived in Helsinki I understood the spaces for art were really restricted to the self-referential cooperative of Finnish artists. If you were lucky you had to send your portfolio and wait for years to have an exhibition space. Then if you were accepted you had to ask for a grant to pay the gallery. The system of art in Finland is insane. I could not wait for this institutional bureaucratic system or I would be too old. For this reason I started to make non-authorized interventions in public space (now is forbidden) where police often were counter-intervening to stop my disruptive interventions. However, after a couple of years, I was lucky enough to be selected for an art research PhD in Aalto University and I was granted for 4 years by the Kone foundation. This allowed me to do my interventions and carry on my research around the world until I got my PhD certificate. I have also published a bunch of academic essays-articles on my practice and books. Even poetries published in international journals.

How do you relate this humanimal community art research to your previous practice?

My interventions desire to disrupt the urban abstract space to carve a critical zone of animal-becoming https://gigibiagini.tumblr.com/ . They are supposed to open a space of intensity for the human flesh to become animal meat, for the human face to become an animal snout. This is an impulsive need in a hyper-organised abstract capitalist space. But I have a problem even with social-democracy and its organized bureaucratic impersonal collectivism. The search for a sensuous and intense animal territory has pushed me to approach human-animal studies. I have studied the major books of this complex interdisciplinary field before elaborating it in art expression. And then there is the direct experience with 100 labradors in a labradors breeding residency with its affection and intensities in play.

How came the idea of your video-recorded performance?

The first idea has been to modify the costume of the Anartist that is my usual character-avatar in my interventions. The costume is inspired by the urban revolt of Black Bloc that I see as a form of Neo-Situationism. The Anartist wears a black dress with a black balaclava that covers the face. Mine is not simply mockery of the original but re-modulation of the codes to inject new vitality in the political mask. It is a repetition with difference that generates an algorithmic line of flight. However, I often adapt the costume to the context. In this case I added a long dog snout to the balaclava by cutting a plastic bottle and long black socks as dog ears and a tail made with a black woman's sock that I filled with paper. I mixed the urban revolt with the rural. Today urban and rural, so much as agricolture and industry are superposed levels even in the countryside that is now invested by an extended urban imaginary. Urban capitalism is subsuming new territories into a single "rurban" metropolis where humans and other species are clashed into each other.

Did you plan your performance before?

No, I have only contextual visions that provide limits of potential to my expression and then I throw myself into a free action to have a revelation inside the limit-frame I have pre-determined. The artist gives himself his strict rules to transgress them. When I throw myself into the action I try to feel the moment and the unfolding action-narrative in becoming. I improvise a dramatization in performance without any rehearsal. To me, a performance with rehearsal is a non-sense. For me doing a performance means to be a medium of the portion of creative time in a situated space. I am in line with the thinking of Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze and Mahayana Buddhism. I am a medium for the expression of a slice of cosmic vitality. I start the performance as an individual who creates a concept-frame for the action but then the action unmakes the contours of the concept and the intervention becomes a collective surfing enterprise full of contingencies that reveal a percept. The wave can produce a lucky accursed revelation because a portion of cosmic becoming enter the performance. In this video the dogs have played a role of co-performers but also the place, the time and the film-maker Nathan Hendrickson enter into the accursed assemblage of creation. My challenge is surfing this collective wave. I think a big role in my intervention is played by the "genius loci" of the place that is an atmospheric "haecceity" that "haptically" charges the potentiality for the mix of action-performance, narrative becoming and visual poetry.

Which episodes of CONTACT ZONE have been more significant and intense for you as part of a humanimal community?

A performance always starts with uncertainty. I did not know if labradors were interested in following Donna Haraway's book trailing on the ground. At the beginning they were almost indifferent but soon they became almost obsessed with the play. Dogs are passional beings, they love to push the play further and further. They feed themselves with more and more intensity. The play with the book was very satisfactory for me and for them. It became a humanimal collective play in excess; then the revelation came when the dogs' bites made the book parted in many pieces scattered all-over and I discovered in my hands the chapter titled "PARTING BITES. Nourishing indigestion". I suddenly stopped the collective humanimal performance as if I (we) had arrived at an accursed something.

Is there some other climaxes in your experience with the contact zone?

In the second part of the 3 parts that divides the video I was still charged and excited with the vitality of the humanimal play with the labradors that took place in the first part. I added the energizing elements of an empty tambourine with metallic rattles that I used as a collar for dogs. I think it was Nathan's suggestion to use the tambourine like that and I suddenly found it interesting. This was the frame I was acting in; but however when you start a performance-intervention you do not know what you are going to do and become. I just started trying to move like if I were a shaman of the dogs. There is a short sequence in the video near the mirror that I really felt I had become like an alpha Molossian Labrador such as Robertino, Vito or Valentino. I think the tambourine helped me to enter into this transfert because the vibration of my body's movement was redoubled and echoed by the rhythms of the rattles like an overstimulated alpha dog.

Is your video a contradictory paradox? You started with joyous sequences of humanimal "contact zone" where the "encounter value" and its indefinite immanent sensations erase every critical distance and rhetoric of commodification; but then you ended up with a critique of bio-capitalism.

The video CONTACT ZONE should not be seen like a linear sequence but like 3 superposed entangled planes. Every event of life is impure. It carries with it both the negative and the positive, the critical and the affirmative; and they are dynamic like the two sides of Tao. The pure becomes impure ad pure again. This dynamic happens between all the opposites that are folded dynamically in each other. The distant and the near, the encounter value and the exchange value, the intellectual critique and the affirmative vitality of the flesh. If I push to the extreme Haraway's concept of "impurity" I must also include the "purity" or I become a "puritan of the impurity". I think the dark side of life is still part of life and cannot be excluded. We cannot eliminate the critique that our being in the world triggers. We are in and out of our own world; sometimes we are at the full center and other times to the empty margins. We cannot eliminate the critical gaze on "reality" offered by Marx or Foucault for example. As an artist I always "stay with the trouble" of the tension between opposites. I stay with the impure mess that involves also the dynamically entangled folds between impure and pure, immanence and transcendence, critique and performative encounter, distance and contact, life and death, intellect and body, rest and movement.

What kind of percept or sensation has prevailed in your approach with the humanimal contact zone?

The play was so intense and active that in the collective spinning I felt the oxygen missing to my brain. I became as "drunk". You can feel this when I am reading the book to the dogs in a language that should be english but looks like the reading of a drunk. The labradors where around me carefully listening and they looked like laughing at my drunk performance. As if they were aware of the grotesque parody of the scene. It was a small humanimal party. They were focused on my reading, attending for something exciting; but you cannot say if they were interested to the philosophical content of the book or to the book as material object to bite, stir and tear up. They were interested in the material sound of my drunk voice in relation to the gesture of reading. They felt attracted by my fake black snout moving up and down when I was reading. They felt my snout as an irresistible trigger for biting and jumping on me in the attempt of biting. The dogs were also dizzy and confused like me by the whole situation that they felt very exciting. They were also looking at the camera as if aware actor and spectator of the scene. Probably they too were laughing as drunk to a party; as an audience of fellows entertained by a strange drunk human character. Maybe is not a chance the cynic performative-philosopher Diogenes used to deal mostly with dogs and was living with them in a wine barrel. Often the performance reveals layers of archetypal myths that everyday "normality" blinds.

Try to zoom in as much as possible to the intimacy of your humanimal experience.

Layers of salivation stuck in my hands, my face, my pants, my balaclava. Intense bestial smell exciting my nostrils. Sweating inside my dress, missing of oxygen. Feeling drunk without drinking. Barking sounds on my ear. Pleasure and pain for the dogs' nips of different pressure. The smooth freshness of the dogs' tongue. A sense (and a non-sense) of spinning play unleashing undefined confused sensations. Energizing and creative thrusts.

Do you think your artwork is interesting?

I do not know, for me, as personal experience was interesting. For a spectator could also be boring, clumsy or valueless... but it should be read as an intervention on the literary space of Donna Haraway' essay doubled by the intervention in the actual space of the Labradors Breeding Compound. For the rest I have said even too much.

Installation version of CONTACT ZONE realized in an exhibition in Havana (Cuba)