To Get In Touch With Crows

video, 6'23" / 2016

Rhona Mühlebach explores through her artistic practice the gap between mankind's desire to humanise nature and nature's inability to match people's expectations. Humans seek to endow it with emotions such as cruelty, kindness, humour, sadness, sympathy, and others. Yet, through her unwavering dedication to building interaction with non-human agents, Rhona Mühlebach shows that this experience can be compassionate and existential, where the very attempts to connect with nature are no less meaningful than the final result.

In her video To Get In Touch With Crows, edited images and cawing, overlaid with a human voice, create a disquieting form of language that Rhona uses to highlight the impossibility of dialogue through humanization, revealing the ambivalence of communization as a safe place.

The artist goes to Queens Park, where she attempts to establish a relationship with crows. The video references the format of popular nature documentaries, where the world of animals and birds is portrayed through human feelings and social relationships.

This deliberately serious narrative, lacking redundant details, ironically shows the failure of the approach of humanising nature, as it creates and maintains clear boundaries of the subject-object relationship as a hierarchical one, where the only criteria for the object, i.e. for nature, to be "heard" is to correspond to the expectations and norms of human society. Watching the animals, people seldom consider that humans, too, are being observed and that the gaze of animals reacts to our actions, which are often inaccessible to humans or understood only on a very primitive level. In the context of the exhibition, Rhona's video work opens a new "door" to the realm of imagination, a place where you are never alone and where "others-non-human" are always present.