Beuys (2013–Present)
Long-term Interspecies Practice
Since 2013, Wantanee has developed a long-term collaborative practice with her African Grey parrot, Beuys. What began as a critical engagement with the legacy of Joseph Beuys gradually evolved into an interspecies partnership grounded in sustained cohabitation, shared routines, and lived attention.
In its early phase, the project examined artistic authority, communication, and political symbolism through performative actions and everyday interaction. Teaching Beuys to vocalise the phrase “Everyone is an artist” became a way to question authorship, agency, and the limits of human-centred language.
From 2018 onward, the collaboration shifted toward investigating interspecies perception and relational forms of intelligence. Rather than treating Beuys as an object of observation, the work develops through prolonged shared life, mutual adjustment, and attentiveness to rhythm, gesture, and environmental sensitivity. Works such as And Yet the Earth is Moved, and People Say Nothing Is Impossible, but Beuys Does Nothing Every Day, emerge from this durational process of co-presence.
Wantanee approaches Beuys as a co-present and autonomous participant rather than a symbol, metaphor, or research subject. The project rejects extractive models of knowledge production and instead foregrounds ethical responsibility, care, and reciprocity as foundational conditions of artistic practice.
Across video, sound, performance, and installation, the project unfolds within domestic space, embodied time, and everyday life. Knowledge is not produced through control, interpretation, or representation, but through sustained relational engagement.
By situating collaboration as a mode of living rather than a method, the Beuys Project argues that perception, memory, and meaning are generated through interspecies co-existence. Artistic intelligence, in this context, is not individual or autonomous, but distributed across bodies, environments, and shared temporalities.
