Beuys and a Coyote: The Silent Relationship began with a direct engagement with Joseph Beuys’s performance, I Like America and America Likes Me. In the early stages of the project, Wantanee wore a coyote fur to question and critically revisit this historical reference.
The work did not remain within the framework of reenactment or quotation. From the outset, the performance was improvised and unrehearsed, shaped by real-time interaction with the African Grey parrot, Beuys. Attention shifted away from symbolic gesture toward lived presence, uncertainty, and mutual responsiveness.
The piece reflects a long-term practice of noticing: how perception shifts, how curiosity emerges, and how communication unfolds without reliance on language or predetermined meaning.
By foregrounding sustained cohabitation and everyday interaction, the work situates artistic practice within lived time and ethical proximity. It proposes interspecies collaboration not as representation, but as a mode of attention through which knowledge, agency, and meaning are generated relationally.