The Unknown and the Unnamed
Performance, 2 hrs 45 mins
Performers: Syd Lee, MJ Allen, Bethy Abera, Calista Lyon
Davis Auditorium, Sturm Hall, University of Denver in conjunction with Vicki Myhren Gallery
May 9, 2024
The Unknown and the Unnamed uses image, voice, sound, multi-screen projection and audience participation to share an embodied experience of story. The performance reckons with the ongoing violence of colonial power in Australia through the protagonist of the endangered crimson spider orchid (Caladenia concolor).
This ongoing, multi-year research project began when Lyon was introduced to an Australian orchid collection created by self-described "recluse" and amateur botanist, Philip John Branwhite (1951-2015), who lived in her family’s farming community in Tallangatta Valley, Australia. Branwhite’s practice of attention to the nonhuman involved creating thousands of botanical specimens, illustrations and field diaries which she uses to investigate the colonial legacy of botanical collecting as a site of knowledge production, but also of abstraction, violence and empire building.
The performance translates scientific concepts through personal story for a general audience. Drawing from her experience growing up on a cattle farm and feminist science studies scholars like Donna Haraway, Lyon uses symbiosis—a mutually beneficial relationship between different organisms—as a metaphor for community, subverting dominant narratives of human individualism. The performance imparts how “individual” existence is borne of and reliant on interconnection via multispecies communities—in this case, one of orchid, cow, fungi, human, and wasp—and how the lives of organisms are made and unmade by one another.
The Unknown and the Unnamed involves animating over 1,400 still images, printed on transparency drawn from Lyon’s lens-based practice and existing images from Philip and Peter Branwhite’s botanical and photographic collections, state and national archives, the internet along with community-sourced material. Up to seven performers work in unison to move the images in and out of the light of analogue overhead projectors, while field recordings and interviews play aloud, and Lyon narrates an 85-page text that she wrote based on her research and oral histories conducted with amateur botanists, conservationists, academics, farmers, and scientists.
Methodologically, Lyon draws from anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing to offer a form of storytelling that centers nonhuman narratives and conceives plants and animals as critical historical actors. This hybrid form draws from the experimental lecture, expanded cinema and theatre forms to:
> Play with knowledge
> Create affective experiences via immersive light, sound, and voice
> Enact community via the research, rehearsals and presentation of the artwork—between artist and community members, artist and performers, performers and performers, performers and audience.
> Be adaptable. The work can be set up, performed, and packed down in a single day—offering a flexibility that enables the performance to be shared not only in theaters, galleries and museums, but also in more unconventional venues that may make it accessible to a diverse audience, such as universities, non-profits, community centers, local halls and public spaces.
Developing iterations of The Unknown and the Unnamed have previously been performed at:
> Davis Auditorium, Sturm Hall, University of Denver in conjunction with Vicki Myhren Gallery, May 9, 2024
> Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA, October 2, 2020
> No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH, February 21, 2019
> Science and Technology Symposium, Urban Arts Space, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, March 7, 2019
> Urban Arts Space, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, March 14, 2019
Past Performers: Mary Jane Ward, Molly Rideout, Amery Kessler, Bryan Ortiz, Tui Lyon, Lucas Dabel, Jameel Paulin, Corey Girard, Melinda Wong, M’Kayla Murdaugh, Anne Kickert, Lydia Smith, Gloria Shows.
Projected image credits: Tobias Hayashi