Spinal
Memory

Spinal
Memory

Spinal
Memory

Spinal
Memory

Spinal
Memory

Research and Practice
on Non-Human Animals

Intro

Spinal Memory, the 4th issue of te magazine, grew out of a reflection on the imagining of non-human animals—examining how humans control, domesticate, and make use of animal bodies, while also trying to sketch out a new, open-ended relationship not yet fixed in form, one that reaches toward the future. As an extension of this issue, we are launching our first online lecture series, inviting 9 speakers to give 8 online lectures.

Each speaker approaches this theme in a completely different way: years of companionship and careful field observation, or history, design, writing, moving image, archives, and data. How should we approach, investigate, or simply imagine what it might mean to live alongside non-human animals? And from there, how do we turn that into practice and research? Weaving together text and practice, each speaker unfolds their own way of working, sometimes out in the open landscapes of pasture and forest, sometimes back at a worktable or in an archive.

Cost

$10 USD / ¥66 CNY per lecture

Duration

1.5 hours per lecture (including Q&A)

Capacity

Limited to 50 participants per lecture

Note

Registrants will receive a replay link valid for one month after the lecture; replays do not include the live Q&A

Digital Reading Room

Alongside the lecture series, we will also build a Digital Reading Room, gathering further readings and moving-image material prepared by the speakers. The conversation between creators, scholars, and audiences won’t end with a single talk. It will keep opening up through ongoing reading, response, and addition, and through thinking together about our sympoiesis with all living things.

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01

Oct 10 9am EDT / 9pm CST
Victoria Soyan Peemot

Horses and Songs: Multispecies Rhythm and Voice in Inner Asia

English

When Tyva people say that the horse is everything in life, this is not a metaphor—it comes from the lived experience of the people who have been mobile pastoralists for millennia, whose lives and identities have been continuously shaped by horses. Drawing on her personal experience and research among mobile pastoralists between the Altai and Sayan mountain ranges in the transnational region of Inner Asia, Dr. Victoria Soyan Peemot explores how Tyvan understandings of voice, sound, and music are rooted in multispecies relationships, with a particular focus on human-equine belonging. Her research brings together horses and their rich sound world with the people and land to which they co-belong. The lecture discusses how the rhythms and lyrics of Tyvan songs and Tyvan ways of understanding the human voice itself emerge from belonging to the land and cohabiting it with other beings.

02

Oct 11 9am EDT / 9pm CST
Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

If There’s No Reply, Is That Silence Still Love?

English

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul has lived with Beuys, an African grey parrot, since 2013. After more than a decade together, she has come to know Beuys’ voices, movements, routines, fears, and desires. She has also kept Beuys’ feathers, images, objects, and documents, and turned to science to learn how parrots see, hear, and navigate the world. Yet the more she knows about Beuys, the more aware she becomes of what she cannot know: what the world is like for Beuys. That distance extends beyond her relationship with Beuys into her wider artistic practice: when she reconstructs what is no longer there from what remains, traces histories she was never there to witness, or measures a distance exactly and still finds that the number cannot tell her what that distance means. Wantanee keeps looking anyway. She is no longer only asking what she can know, but what makes her think she has received an answer. What makes something an answer, and who decides? And if there is no reply, how does she know that what she calls silence is silence at all?

03

Oct 17 9am EDT / 9pm CST
Terezie Štindlová

Do We Need Zoos?

English

Do we need zoos? Why do we enjoy looking at animals? What lies behind the simple human desire to feel connected to animals? These are the questions Terezie Štindlová set out to ask through her platform ZOO Index, an open archive of visual and textual zoo related material questioning its relevance in contemporary society. In this lecture, Terezie traces the development of ZOO Index from her initial interests in Zoo design and architecture toward broader questions about human ways of relating to animals, following this thinking as it takes shape through the publication process, the collaborations behind it, and the project’s possible futures.

Before the talk, the session opens with a short excerpt from a sound piece by artist Qihang Li, an immersive soundscape originally composed for ZOO Index’s book launch in Amsterdam.

04

Oct 24 9am EDT / 9pm CST
Boria Sax (Guest Moderator: Ruoyi Shi)

Stories, Poetry, and Birdsong

English

Boria Sax has long studied how animals have moved through human culture, stories, and mythology. This lecture argues that birdsong is similar to the poetry of Dylan Thomas or John Ashbery, where there is almost no literal meaning but a great deal of suggestiveness. Human beings organize experience primarily through storytelling, which serves, among other things, to construct identities, build communities, teach lessons, and set goals. Animals from wolves to fireflies are also constantly exchanging messages. This is especially apparent in birds, for whom songs and calls are used for courtship, proclaiming territory, issuing warnings, and affirming bonds, all of which are also central motifs in the tales told by human beings. These vocalizations also resemble human stories in that they modulate their tempo for purposes such as the building or release of dramatic tension. They differ from human stories, and even more from products of artificial intelligence, in that they are profoundly embedded in the world to a point where the question of “truth” or “falsity” can become irrelevant.

The lecture will be joined by artist Ruoyi Shi as guest moderator.

05

Oct 25 9am EDT / 9pm CST
Robert Zhao Renhui

Seeing Forest: Encounters, Evidence and Ways of Knowing

English

How do we come to know a forest through the encounters we have within it? Similar questions extend across Robert Zhao Renhui’s practice: what can we know from what we observe and document, and how much can such evidence really tell us? In this lecture, Robert shares the fieldwork and artistic processes behind his investigations into Singapore’s secondary forests. Moving between the Institute of Critical Zoologists which he founded in 2018 and his project *Seeing Forest*, he traces how repeated visits, camera observations and found objects become photographs, moving images, installations and publications. Through stories from the field, this lecture reflects on what images reveal, what remains uncertain, and how sustained attention can change our understanding of the lives and histories that make up a place.

06

Oct 31 9am EDT / 9pm CST
Oscar Salguero

The Rhizomatic Archive: Interspecies Library

English

Interspecies Library is an independent archive launched in a Brooklyn apartment in 2019, as an experiment in mapping a growing, species-wide fascination with more-than-human worlds. In this lecture, founder and curator Oscar Salguero traces the story of this living archive, from informal salon-style gatherings to large-scale gallery exhibitions, original book commissions and limited editions, and, more recently, collaborations to develop an itinerant version of the library that brings these works into new environments and cross-pollinating dialogues. Today, the archive stewards over 500 volumes by international artists and independent presses, documenting how the book, an ancient human technology, continues to serve as a portal to imagining and embodying shared fungal, bacterial, plant, animal, and viral futures.

07

Nov 7 9am EDT / 9pm CST
许哲瑜 Hsu Che-Yu & 陈琬尹 Chen Wan-Yin

Specimen of Suffering

Chinese (with real-time Translated Captions via Zoom)

This lecture moves from a mallard at Natural History Museum Rotterdam, killed after flying into a glass panel, to the Przewalski’s horses of Mongolia; from the Nazi-era attempt to breed back the extinct Tarpan, to the beasts executed at Taipei Yuan-Shan Zoo during wartime; and on to the pathological specimens held at Amsterdam’s Museum Vrolik—research the artist has pursued across moving image, writing, archival research, and near-forensic methodologies. Their works keep asking: how do specimens reconstruct memory? How do they conceal historical violence, or become monuments to their own suffering? This lecture invites us to reconsider how museums, science, and political ideology shape the stories behind these specimens. Beyond this, Hsu and Chen will also discuss the research behind their essay *Suffering and the Specimen*, and drawing on their own works, to trace how these histories move between fieldwork, archival material, and working method.

08

Nov 8 9am EDT / 9pm CST
沙爽 Sha Shuang

Writing a Cow: From Surveillance Data to Fiction

Chinese (with real-time Translated Captions via Zoom)

Every cow on the farm has its own number. How much it eats, how far it walks, when it goes into heat, how much milk it gives—all of it is quietly logged by the machines. In 2021, Sha Shuang spent six months at an animal-monitoring data company in Xundian, Yunnan, working alongside a team of programmers. Months of fieldwork left her with a realization: the production system of a cattle farm and human social life aren’t so different after all—both made of bodies, labor, reproduction, care, and the daily experience of being logged and managed by one system or another. Her essay *Finding the Steppes* grew directly out of these field experiences. This lecture begins with that piece of semi-fiction, tracing why she moved from “monitoring cows” to “writing cows,” and how years of fieldwork among dairy cows, grasslands, milk, data, and ecological systems slowly found their way into her art practice.