Monika Tobel is a London based Hungarian artist researching communication and connection with the more-than-human world. Her work consists of performance, video, and sound alongside installations.   The main focus of her practice is to investigate the possibilities of non-lingual communication between different entities, and the potentials of information exchange via scents, sounds, touch, and movement alongside deep listening practices. The driving force behind these  actions is to find ways, through rituals of inclusion, new call and responses beyond the human centric experience and expand social modalities towards and into the other-than-human sphere. She is currently studying for a doctorate at the University of East London.

In a world guided and guarded by rules of phallocentric capitalism softness is radical, caring, listening, giving, and sharing is radical. Despite and because of the teachings of individualism we must form communities, communities built on mutual care for, all be it human or more-than-human. We need to embrace our bodies as multispecies ecosystems and rejoice in the porous nature of the world that allows nutrients, information, and emotions to flow in between diverse life forms.

I feel the way froward is to learn how to interact with all that is around us and within us: using communication methods that supersede language, finding communicative tools in the quiet places of listening, and exchanging information via all the senses. Let’s engage through tactile means, be it by intercepting olfactory messages, listening to the rustles of movement, or touching and allowing to be touched; being open to the messages offered to us by our co-habitants in order to find possibilities of a continuing coexistence through “giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful that wasn’t there before.” (Haraway, 2016)

Through listening, through being attentive it is possible to recognise that we are part of nature and not outside of it, lifting the heavy veil of the dichotomies embedded in modern existence. The lines dividing nature/culture, human/animal, male/female fade away and a deep acknowledgement of belonging arises. With belonging comes responsibility, a necessity for mutual care, which transforms the personal to the political and vice versa.   

 Listening is acknowledging agency and giving power. Listening is opening-up and letting-in, listening is becoming with; listening is mutual transformation. By recognizing agency in all intra-action, power relations shift, kinships arise and communities form. Communities where care and belonging give rise to positive action. Listening is radical softness.

Comingled symbiotic forms

Sharing information via

liquid molecular exchange

Waterry introduction

The taste of here, now

Circulating fluids

being malleable

being open

being tolarent

allowing input

welcoming change

Fir Tree

Lichen

Snow

Human

Snow Body

Heat Body

Sensory introduction to the elements

Through the elements

I imagine the pores of my skin opening up

like little funnels

While the freshly melted water

picks up chemicals, death skin cells

bodily information 

carrying it all

slithering down

sipping into the soil.

We are all porous

there are no solid borders

All entities

All matter

Exists in a constant flow of

interpenetrative co-mingling

It is beutiful to be multitudinous