Biting – Selin Davasse

In Biting, Selin Davasse inhabits the voices of various domesticated animals: a city pigeon, a laboratory mouse, and a honeybee. Even the texts take on their forms: each monologue follows the logic, rhythm, and movement of its animal — bobbing like the pigeon, fleeing like the mouse, swarming like the bee. Biting traces the entanglements of animality, language, and capital, and takes as its premise that figures of speech are animal before they are figurative. Even terms such as capital, brand, and stock have their roots in animal husbandry.
Through performance, Selin Davasse adjudicates tacit contracts of hospitality, domestication, and labor between a bestial feminine stranger, heterogeneous publics, and the institutions framing their encounter. Shifting between personae, each with her own grammar and physicality, she translates systems of thought into intimate utterances between speech and song.

Biting follows on from earlier performances and develops them further. This version of the work is being shown for the first time.