FLIGHT PATH
“What does activism look like at the end of hope? How are we being invited into the work of making sanctuary?” BAYO AKOMOLAFE
Flight path is an experiential futures installation presented at the Hillscene Festival of Live Art in 2019.
How are we to live within the ruins of a damaged planet? How do we come to (de)composition of a multispecies world?
Located in a speculative future after ecological collapse and the subsequent hundred-year hunger, participants enter the space as volunteers - tasked with marking the absence of long-dead insect bodies, recording those that have begun to return, and taking an active role in their regeneration. Through a series of direct, tactile encounters with live larvae, participants shaped the lab space - identifying, charting and reimagining their dependence upon and entanglement with the insect population both in the installation and across the larger external site. Participants were invited to consider how they might shape new behavioural practices of kinship, trialling a series of activities and exercises that involve multispecies inclusion and care. Black Soldier flies were chosen for their valuable work in decomposition. Consuming decaying matter and excreting nutrient rich matter called ‘frass’, this species thematically assisted in highlighting the urgent need to dismantle and recompose human relationships to the biosphere.
Within the lab volunteers explored co-visioning, material languages, speaking and listening across scales, multispecies mapping and translation across species lines. Across the festival site, volunteers stewarded their larval companions and made speculative maps for future flight paths, as well as gathering data on insect lives successfully spawned on site. An unexpected outcome saw many of the Larvae leave with their humans, as the majority of festival participants felt emotionally bound with their cluster personally responsible for their hatching.
FLIGHT PATH was developed with an ecological methodology. Using radical inclusion of site and multispecies participants, FLIGHT PATH was created through practices of attention, deep listening, slow work and by foregrounding the more-than-human. The method, and the larger inquiry surrounding the work was published in the International Journal of Practice Based Humanities, and can be read about here.
Participatory Live Art
Informed by site (-37.8163009,145.379969)
and the participation of Black Soldier Fly Larvae
Sound by Amais Hanley and Jake Steele
Photography by Devika Bilimoria
