Ange Neveu is an artistic researcher and writer based in Rotterdam. They are interested in the intersection of sex, eco-surveillance and technologies of (re)production, particularly in non-human and queer bodies. They often present their findings through video installations, performance lectures and publications.
May your eyes never look away, may your genitals always be lubricated - May Your Eyes Never Look Away, May Your Genitals Always Be Lubricated (2022) delves into the controlled existence of captive pandas. Exclusively using found footage, it traces the lengths humans go to propagate them, manage their desires and render them irresistible to our eyes. Surfing through pornographic productions, YouTube comments and research papers, these images reveal regimes of sexual governance but also the resistance strategies and variability of desires of the vulnerable species.
May your eyes never look away, may your genitals always be lubricated - This project delves into the eco-surveillance regimes tending to captive pandas and their reproduction. It traces the practices of production/circulation of their images, the physical regimen and genetic management, as ways of governing the sexual desires of this vulnerable specie. By hoarding the images and objects involved in those circuits and fictionalising their relations, I investigate how different sites such as scientific research facilities, porn industries, nationalism, and popular media operate to create situated knowledge about the pandas' vulnerable bodies. The research also calls into question the variability of panda sexual desires and the resistance strategies and bodily knowledge they harness to counteract these regimes of control.
On the first level, this research is about pandas, and the lengths humans go to propagate them, manage their desires and render them irresistible to our eyes. The second layer explores the multitude and will of images (of pandas) and the strange connections they create as well as their network of production, distribution and secondary circulation. The third level is an exploration of fluidity in the various forms it takes within this project, whether in bodily fluids of the controlled (sperm, piss, blood, vaginal secretion, sweat), the pixels that carry human and non-human desires (the porn they watch, the one we make for them) and flows of capital (trade offer: you get= a couple of fertile pandas for ten years, you give= a dual-use technology, preferably uranium).
Panda watching panda porn - 'Panda watching panda porn' is a short story commissioned by Thijs de Zeeuw to be included in the publication 'Making Love in the Zoo'. Based on research about the way male panda sexuality, it is a strange coming of age story in which a male panda struggles to complete his sexual training. Amids personal and existential fears about the future of his specie, he needs to reckon with his social position in the Giant Panda Studbook as a male of low genetic priority.
On errors, accidents and other tales - On errors, accidents and other tales' are three interconnected short stories of love and desire. These speculative stories feature two unlikely couples: a panda stud and his lover a surveillance camera that follows his every
move, and a lesbian vet and her partner. The stories follow their intimate struggles with reproductive reproductive technologies and bodily autonomy.
Set in the recent past, the stories stem from an absurd paradox. In 2018, the Beauval Zoo (France) desperately attempts to breed pandas in its care through several rounds of artificial insemination. Meanwhile, the right to medically assisted reproduction is still unavailable to single women, lesbians and trans people. Enshrined Enshrined in law, this disparity of access between heterosexual pandas and queer women points to an underlining value system determining how the state denies reproductive technologies to certain bodies while weaponising their use against others. This cross-species comparison shows that some individuals individuals are worth protecting over others. However, these stories also question the cost of 'access' within legal frameworks and trace the contours of cross-species queer alliances shaping their (non)reproductive future.
Here and Then (out there later) - Here and there (out there later) is an archaeological excavation of vacant spaces, through google maps and fieldwork. While common in southern European countries, these unproductive areas are scarce in the built environment of the Netherlands. These marginal spaces exist on the margin of economic, social and cultural circuits of urban life and offer the possibility to rethink the necessity of productivity, integration and ecological control.
The project focuses on the mechanisms of urban and social undoing that produce vacant areas by navigating Google Maps Street View. Street Views reveal a hybrid space structured by non-linear timelines and populated non-human agents. Plants reclaim the area, surveillance companies hover on after a decade and failed construction projects produce an ambiguous topography. The project also sketches a spatial ontology of Google Maps Street View and its embodied experience in the digital world.
Bloemen assortiment 3 - Bloemen Assortiment 3 is a video tryptic documenting the disruption of a temporary plant community. Titled after the mix of wildflower seeds disseminated everywhere to prevent the growth of unwanted and invasive plants, the video interrogates the consequences of ecological management.
Based on daily fieldwork, the project follows the progression of a minor urban event: the planting of trees on a bridge over a highway. The documentation of the routine work zooms on the plant inhabitants of the space, their partial destruction and replacement with other more manageable plants. Over two weeks, field recordings and conversations with the municipality workers unravel complex fractures Trees reveal themselves to be nomadic, planted and removed on a tight schedule. ’Wild flowers’ are sawn by humans and rely on them for survival. The municipality propagates plants with aggressive growth but destroys ‘invasive’ plants.
Amid tensions provoked by the presence of an outside observer, the role of the camera becomes ambiguous. Is the camera recording a common act of destruction or performing it? What in this event is forever lost and cannot be captured by the camera? Through the questions, a new space for grieving ordinary disappearance is created.
Bread Boy Pigeon King - Bread Boy Pigeon King is a performance and text developped as part of "Why look at animals?" and performed at Zone2Source.
"I am covered in bread, again. The softest cover on my body. I am soft, comfortable and vulnerable. My limbs are stiff and I cannot move too fast. I’m also white and visible. Pain de mie, mie de pain. What is inside of the bread is on the outside of my body. The crust is just here for the colour, it’s not really crusty at all. There is nothing to protect the softness of my insides. My hands sink into softness. Putting all this bread on my body was tiring, I need to rest.
Visible vulnerable and slow; no wonder that bread people did not evolve alongside humans. But maybe they did. When we are born, our skin is as soft as soft bread, we are as round as a loaf. we sleep a lot like a tired bread person under a tree."
