Erik Bünger's work focuses on phenomena, which are generally assumed to lie beyond the realm of language. Concepts such as 'voice', 'body', 'image' and 'nature' make up zones of indeterminacy – simultaneously inside and outside language. In performance lectures, videos, texts and musical compositions, he explores how such concepts, by referring to something mute and un­speakable beyond the reach of the linguistic, be­come central voids around which our reality is built up.

The Elephant Who Was a Rhinoceros is a lecture performance that revolves around the role the animal plays in human language as a name for that speechlessness from which speech once took off. A creature that does not speak; a creature you cannot speak of. The work traces the footprints of this impossible figure as it appears every time the definition of the human, as a speaking being, is measured against the animal, as mute and unspeakable. It takes us to the first figurative cave paintings from 40 000 years ago, to Adam’s naming of the animals in the Bible, to the beast hidden at the inception of the alphabet, to a fear of ‘calling the animal by its proper name’, which seems to permeate every culture on earth. It is the elephant in every room. It is a white bear, whose silhouette looms larger with every effort to keep it out of your mind.

Aodhan Madden is an artist and a writer.

Viper’s Traffic Knot is a sequence of routines for a solo performer. ‘I want to show you shapes of soft furniture, like the curve of the body with the legs fission-split, bunny legs, and how they twitch from a low guttural tone to roam over the knot in the middle to the higher notes, radiating like newmown hay, like honeysuckle, or even woods’ fragrance.’