Miranda Whall

In my ongoing series of Crossed Paths performances I aim to address shifting ecologies and climate justice from a non–human and interspecies perspective. My practice is about getting close, being with, and of becoming, in becoming a creature of the mud, the matter and the flesh of the world I aim to develop and present a non – hierarchical, more ethical and more complex relationship to our environment and non–human others. My crawling practice explores complex interspecies dynamics through a form of economical, meditative, ritualistic and absurd activism. Recently I moved away from animals to trees, so far I have crawled with an Oak, Birch, May (Hawthorn), Bardsey Apple, Scots Pine, (Malus) Rudolph and Olive Tree in an attempt to present my crawling body as a site for new encounter and a platform for human and non–human exchange. Proposing that from ‘down there’ in a non – upright position we might better understand our place in the biosphere, and so develop more mutually beneficial, sustainable and respectful interspecies relationships. In becoming a human/vegetal/animal/technological hybrid, I temporarily became an ‘it’ an – other, an alliance, a symbiotic union, a co- creating community, an interconnected future. When I enter the space between my crawling body and the land – the “turbulent, immanent field” of the forest floor, the sand dune, the street or the mud flats for example “in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve and disintegrate” to quote Michael Serres in his book The Birth of Physics, I directly explore material entanglement.