What is the difference between talking with and talking about nonhuman animals?

Commonly, the former engages a certain performative speech within discourses of subjugation and/ or affection, and the latter rather involves those of superiority, utility and commodity. Are human languages an ever blooming possibility, or still a strict limitation? Les non-dupes errent? Vocal rhythms caught in the middle of a rescue operation suggest that other purposes mobilize different type of talk.

Tactile, absorbing and memetic, the rhythms that permeate and structure daily lives are those we long to recreate in all the strictness of the human beat. Necessarily though, there is a possibility or an imaginary of their violation. Rhythms extracted by animating non-animate objects discharge each in its proper continuation.

Then also, Homo homini lupus est. Traveling from Hobbes to the Garden of Eden, Emil and I are strolling around what went wrong in the society of humans and the common sense of its relation to nonhuman animals. Animals do not possess knowledge, but have a sense of moderation. What exactly do we attribute to this notion of knowledge, and why are humans deprived of that sense of moderation?

Sound composition created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at the George Enescu National Museum in Tescani Village, Bacău County, Romania in September 2021.

Photo: Nicu Ilfoveanu

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Anna Kravets (Kyiv, Ukraine) is a researcher holding a double Master’s in cultural studies and social sciences. Her fields of activity include radio art and radio journalism, podcasting, translation. In her work and research projects, she has addressed linguistic aspects of power relations and mechanisms of collective imaginary, anthropology of voice, work in migration, experimental media. In 2017, she founded the Radio International experimental radio workshop. Her current projects oscillate between work and routine philosophies, conditions of precarity, shifted subjectivity and participative vocalizations. She runs a radio show about the transformations of work and leisure on RUI/ Cashmere Radio.

All sounds (recorded, composed, edited) by Anna Kravets for SEMI SILENT