KIND
An Interspecies Scenography for the Public Eye
Urbanites +
What does it mean to belong to a species?
First exhibited in Antalya, Turkey as part of International Architecture Biennial of Antalya, this installation plays with the double meaning of the word kind, as category, and as care. By reassembling a variety of public surveillance equipment across urban and natural settings, Kind invites viewers to question the idea of species, the notion of coexistence, and the potentials of interspecies modalities.
The work began with an observation rooted in the public security distinctions of day to day life, and in time developed into a narrative of domestication, of the civic operations that divide nature into the wild and the civil. Surveillance cameras have now become, inevitably, a species of urban public space. We don't question their existence any more than crows perching on electrical cables. We don't pay attention to them, neither the crows nor the cameras. Mounted in clusters, fixed in posture, lidless and vigilant, these devices exhibit a kind of behavioral ecology. They nest. They watch. They never sleep. They hunt. They never forget.
Kind asks us to sit with the divisions and reciprocities between machine, animal, and human, and to question what rewilding might mean in a world where the camera is already native. To stand before these machines holds open a liminal space of being seen, without being known. It is to be observed without being understood.
The installation does not offer answers. It offers a species for your consideration.
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