Is the parrot's voice their own?: A roundtable on agency, voice, and the politics of representation in artistic animal collaboration
How can interpecies art avoid reinscribing anthropocentric, extractive and colonial dynamics in the name of giving voice or visibility?
- Date
- 10 June 2025
- Time
- 16:30 -19:00
- Location
- BG 3
- Room
- VOX-POP - ground floor
In a relaxed roundtable setup with artist-filmmaker Quenton Miller, curator Sergi Rusca, and researcher Mariska Jung, we will explore how artistic and curatorial practices can engage animals not merely as symbols or subjects, but as agents. What situated knowledge do animals bring to an art work? What does it mean to give voice and agency to nonhuman animals, or to question the act of its possibility? And what common traps such as ventriloquism must we be wary of?
This conversation invites critical reflection the uneven terrain of interspecies world-making.
Programme outline
- 16:30 Walk-in
- 16:45 Introduction roundtable
- 16:55 Short film screening Koki, Ciao
- 17:05 Roundtable conversation
- 18:15 - 18:45 Borrel / drinks
About Simulacrum
Simulacrum is a quarterly arts and culture magazine based in Amsterdam, established in 1991. Each issue centers on a specific theme and features contributions from students, emerging writers, and experts across disciplines. The magazine publishes a range of content, including academic essays, interviews, columns, fiction, poetry, and visual art, all approached from both historical and contemporary perspectives. In addition to its print publication, Simulacrum functions as an online platform for upcoming art criticism, and organises events such as film screenings, symposia and launch gatherings to engage with its audience and foster a vibrant art writing community.
Quenton Miller is an Australian artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam, and co-founder of the art space and collective When Site Lost the Plot, as well as the collective The Department of Speculative Facts. He has shown work at the Athens Biennale, apexart, West Space, 1646, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, and IFFR. His latest work, Koki, Ciao, is a short experimental documentary and autobiography co-created with Koki, a 67-year-old cockatoo and former pet of Yugoslavian dictator Tito.
Sergi Rusca is a curator whose practice focuses on intersectional ecology, with forays into philosophy of science, queer studies, and more-than-human worlding. In the past, he has contributed to research for the publication Bestiary of Corona Animals, and at the moment he is gallery curator at Ellen De Bruijne PROJECTS in Amsterdam, and curator at RADIUS Centre for Contemporary Art and Ecology in Delft. The recent exhibition series at RADIUS, Beyond Political Limits, aims to present the work of artists and other stakeholders to imagine the ways by which humans and non-humans alike can emancipate and organise themselves politically, moving towards a multispecies political ecology.
Mariska Jung is a PhD candidate in Political Science and is writing a dissertation on the dynamics between (anti)racism and animal politics in the Low Countries at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. She is affiliated with RHEA, the university research center for gender, diversity, and intersectionality, and with the Race-Religion Constellation project at Radboud University. She also works as secretary for the Institute for Social Justice (currently being established) at Leiden University. In 2022, she received a Fulbright Schuman grant for a research stay at the University of California, Berkeley, where she initiated a working group in the field of Critical Race and Animal Theory.
