Dear Pascal,
We’ve found ourselves in this Art and Ecology program at an austerity-striking Goldsmiths in the throes of a post-Brexit, pandemic strained London, where we’ve committed ourselves to meaningfully apprehending and addressing the advanced stages of the unevenly produced and distributed anthropogenic mass extinction event. Within our many shared concerns and resonances, the question of animal rights—or an ethical orientation towards non-humans, has been a recurring theme of mutual interest. My concerns and conflicts around an ethical relationship to animals has been present throughout my life, while my engagement with animal studies has been informal and cursory. I sense you have made this inquiry a primary focus of your work and study, and I’m very much looking forward to learning more during this dialogue. I hope that our conversation will be a generative site and a way into a broader discourse.
Would you like to maybe introduce some of your concerns, commitments and practice? I’m particularly interested in your establishment of a nonprofit ecosocial film-making collective, and what attracted you to this model. I also still have—and have not yet completed—your Animal Remains Transfer form. Somehow the formalized bureaucracy added to the cruelty and violence of eating animals is proving quite an effective deterrent. A combination of eating animals AND filling out paperwork is just too much for me.
