My name is Sabrina Sow, and my stage name is La Négresse à Cheval. I inhabit the world through an animal relationship with my herd. I live in a yurt on a forty-hectare plot of land, a ‘permaculture’ place in the making, called La Bonnette. Solar panels allow me to generate my own electricity, I have a water supply equipped with a meter from which I draw about thirty liters per day for two people. We live on the fringes of the system in a form of semi-liberty. Fourteen horses are our companions in life.

One of the oldest horses in the herd slipped away one windy night. He was twenty-five years old and we had lived together for twenty-three years. You can never prepare yourself for death. Even though you know it’s the common outcome, it always comes as a surprise. Until recently, my horses were between three and thirty years old. Recently a baby was born. Some of them are ‘outcasts’, individuals who have rejected the system in which they were to be confined. Others are lucky ones born in these meadows. They are my center, my source of energy, a kind of moving root that connects me to the living.

We ‘work’ together, or rather we interact in a system that we have created. A system that we often export to the city, a bubble of life and wildness that we stage in equestrian shows, in the open air and in the street or on theater stages. This is what keeps us going, what pays the bills. In concrete terms, we humans and they horses create artistic objects that we bring into the public space.

I am worried today about the pressure that a part of society exerts on those who live and work with animals, I am worried about seeing the relationship between humans becoming more strained and taking our relationship with animals and nature to task, I am simply worried that one day my way of life, as well as being marginal, will become illegal. This is one of the reasons for launching this hybrid study.

Also. I am a black, mulatto, mixed-race woman. Yes, but so what? My appearance, my blackness, my gender could make me the victim of several processes of domination that undermine our hyper-hierarchical society. And yet, I am not aware of having been a victim of racism or sexism. It was not until I was in my forties that I realized I was an exception. I recently met (at a hearing) with a group of racialized women of all skin colors, ages, and social backgrounds. These women told me about situations they had experienced so many times that they didn’t even want to talk about them anymore. I cannot thank Rebecca Chaillon enough for making this meeting possible. She gave me a clearer picture: what I knew in theory, these women experienced in their bodies, on a daily basis. They all had a common experience, that of being judged, misjudged, prejudged on the basis of their physical appearance. And me, in what world had I spent all this time? In a parallel universe? Discovering my own incongruity, I tried to understand why this was so. Was this a form of blindness? Was I an exception confirming the rule?

The following reasoning came to mind: I think that my intimacy with the animals protected me, brought me to another place, to a kind of confidence in myself and in the other that defuses the oblique looks, the derogatory remarks. Interaction with horses has given me a kind of knowledge of non-verbal relationships, an attention to the other person and enough confidence to deconstruct aggressive relationships from the start.

I want to show here that another society is possible. We can get out of this system of domination and enter a new, fluid, constantly changing, and ever-changing system — that of cooperation.

When I met Franziska and Natan, I build the desire to show our mixed interaction through science, video-art, and text. We choose to connect with Bouboule to create a dreamlike object, a reflection of our link and friendship.