Relation de Voyage

SLQS/Bilal: Walking Together

Walking Together documents a performative act in which SLQS walks on horseback through the permissive bridleways of Walthamstow Marshes in London. Inspired by the walking meditations of Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, the film explores relationships with the more-than-human world and raises questions of access, land rights, and belonging. Through the embodied gesture of wearing an áo dài, a traditional Vietnamese dress, SLQS inhabits her diasporic Vietnamese roots. This not only challenges traditional perceptions of equestrians in the UK, but also points towards the reclaiming of space and identity in rural contexts.

This film was made in collaboration with equine partner Spirit of Saigon.

Embodied Ecotones: A Meditation on Walking Together by Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp

In response to 'Walking Together' by SLQS/Bilal

The wild expanse of Walthamstow Marshes breathes patiently amongst London’s urban sprawl. The last remaining grassland yet to be swallowed by the city. Once common land for grazing and hay cutting, it is now an urban ‘green space’, criss-crossed with bicycle paths, railway lines and permissive bridleways. In ecology, an ecotone is where two adjacent, yet different ecosystems meet, embrace, and transform one another (Neimanis 2012). As I witness SLQS walking on horseback through this marshland, where the rural and urban entwine, I think about ecotones on a bodily scale – human and nonhuman bodies enfolding and transforming in the act of encounter.

Can the ecotone help us in unthinking our colonial inheritance of mastery (Singh 2018) and move towards more reciprocal modes of relational being with the nonhuman world? The equestrian relationship is shaped in part by histories of power, dominance, and control, yet in Walking Together the artists invite the viewer to meditate upon the possibilities of future relations entangled within these complexities. By attending to the energetic cadences of their performative encounter – shared breath, heartbeats, vibrations – we are attuned to an interspecies synchronicity, in which the boundaries of human and horse begin to quiver and become slippery.

An ecotone is also a dynamic negotiation of forces, each environment carrying its own sticky histories which rub up against one another. Wearing an áo dài, a traditional Vietnamese garment, SLQS gestures towards her own diasporic ecotones, reminding us that we ourselves are embodied ecosystems born of multiplicity, movement, and interaction. In this way, Spirit of Saigon, the Andalusian horse, carries with him lineages of warfare and conquest, of breeding and domesticity. The ecotone between human and animal is never innocent, but if, as we learn from Astrida Neimanis, Eco means home and Tone means tension, can we learn to be at home in the complexity of our relations? To ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) in the liminal spaces where histories clash and multiply? For it is here in the ecotones that transformation happens.

Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp is a UK based art writer, producer and Techne funded researcher.

Haraway, Donna. 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press

Neimanis, Astrida. 2012, ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, on becoming a body of water’ in Gunkel et al. (eds) Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing future concepts, bodies and subjectivities in feminist thought and practice, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Singh, Julietta. 2018, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, Durham: Duke University Press

SLQS

SLQS is a Franco-Vietnamese artist living and working in London. Her interdisciplinary practice is rooted in research and site-specific performance, which find material expression through sculpture, sound installation, video, and mixed media.

Grounding her embodied research in personal and socio-historical archives, SLQS interrogates questions of ecological relation, land rights, nonhuman perspectives, and motherhood from an intersectional feminist position. Often challenging dominant notions of belonging, the artist’s own experiences as a diasporic woman, mother, and equestrian shapes how she encounters and enters into dialogue with space, place, and other beings.

Recent solo exhibition: Roan/m, MOMA Machynlleth, Machynlleth (2023). Selected group exhibitions include: UKNA New Artist Collective, Lincoln Museum & St Mary Le Wigford, Lincoln (2023), Near Dwellers, Street Road Artist Space, Pennsylvania USA (2023), LADA Screens on Motherhood, Live Art Development Agency (LADA), London (2023), The Procreate Project Archive, The Science Gallery, London (2023). Selected UKNA New Artist Collective 2022-23. Performance co-created for Convex: Thalweg, Totally Thames, London (2019), Float, Totally Thames, London (2018)

Bilal

Bilal is a filmmaker and sound artist living and working in London, specialising in music video and experimental film. With a focus on vibrant stylised aesthetics, collage and overlays; his collaborative work explores the dynamics of the urban landscape and human expression, often woven into multimedia pieces. With his ambient, electronic soundscapes, Bilal lifts his storytelling with a distinct auditory dimension.

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Relation de Voyage: SLQS/Bilal: Walking Together

SLQS