By Kaisu Koski and Nick Dunn

This artistic practice develops musical-performative interventions for rodent rights and well-being, considering performance art as an ecological practice. It builds bridges between performance studies and critical animal studies, centering on the complexity of the human-rodent relationship. When we consider our relationships with other species, we typically bring to mind our daytime experiences and, thus, the nonhumans that we might encounter or anticipate being active. However, most rodents are crepuscular or nocturnal, going about their lives out of sight and out of mind of most people. We seek to address this gap in knowledge and understanding by questioning our relationships with nonhuman life after dark. Our work develops performative practices about and for rodents as wild animals subject to extinction and intelligent survivors able to invasion. We will present aspects of our speculative interventions drawing from the Medieval legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The legend is considered a multi-layered and early version of nonhuman displacement engineered by humans and stigmatizing another species (Dunn and Koski, 2023). We will also share how the project is now expanding to support the endangered Hazel Dormouse by being inspired by the dormouse character in Lewis Carroll’s (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The primary media used in our practice are music videos. Some of our songs are composed as a homage to extinct rodent species. Some of them aim to expand the rodents’ intellectual capacities and, hence, their chances of survival. Fundamentally, the songs aim to decolonize human attention from consumerism and human-centrism and reframe rodents as holders of knowing and mammals worthy of thriving.

You can watch Kaisu’s and Nick’s fantastic fabular music video ‘ExitSong’, discussed in the presentation, following this link.

Kaisu Koski is a cross-disciplinary artist with a background in performance, film, and biological materials. She is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at Sheffield Hallam University.

Nick Dunn is the Executive Director of Imagination, the design-led research lab at Lancaster University, where he is also a Professor of Urban Design. He is the founding Director of the Dark Design Lab, exploring the impacts of nocturnal activity on humans and nonhumans. As the electro-acoustic postpunk duo Burn City Pipers, Kaisu and Nick create songs, music videos, and sound poems about and for more-than-human justice. They are working on their first album, Exit Songs, which is dedicated to endangered and extinct nonhuman animals in anthropogenic climate change.