Symbionts

The work Symbionts emerges from discarded bird and small animal cages, transformed through welding, bending and rearrangement into hybrid structures. In this process, the cages lose their original function as unambiguous architectures of inside and outside, becoming relational formations in which boundaries grow unstable and permeable.
In relation to the festival theme OUT/SIDE/IN, the work examines cages as material boundary-making: they produce interior spaces, define exclusions and organise bodies. At the same time, they become porous, deformed and permeable. Doors, bars and planes shift their meaning; inside and outside can no longer be clearly located.
Drawing on Donna Haraway's concept of the "critter," the cage-symbionts are understood not as objects but as more-than-human beings: wilful, historically charged entities that form relations, carry traces and possess agency. They appear not as overcome structures, but as co-responsible actors within a shared assemblage.
The work also engages Karen Barad's concept of intra-action: meaning, form and agency are not given in advance, but emerge through the interplay of material, space, movement and those who encounter the work. The critters do not constitute themselves in isolation, they are brought forth situationally.
In the age of Haraway's Chthulucene, symbiosis is the condition of existence. The cage-symbionts propose a speculative situation in which OUT, SIDE and IN appear not as opposites, but as dynamic, mutually generative states: entangled, interdependent and never fully separable from one another.