Project description. The Other Wild: touching art as confrontation

Abstract

The Other Wild interrogates internalized normative structures that harness and govern life as well as non-life, and examines ways in which these structures incorporate exclusion and demonization of states of body and mind. I choose to call these excluded things ‘wildness’, and to ask: What might this ‘wildness’ be? Posing this overarching question through artistic practice, the following subsidiary questions will be posed: How do contemporary politics and juridical systems inhabit individual bodies, and how do normative structures manifest themselves within the body? At which point is this linked to different systems of belief and historical power relationships? How and with what justification does this extend out from the body into the land, entities and life and our notions of wilderness? I will use the term "structural magic" as a tool to look at the paranormal (beyond normal) and inter-normal activity performed in structures like state institutions, as well as the individual and collective body. The Other Wild poses these questions through different examples and art works, located specifically within and in relation to the Scandinavian welfare state.