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Linked to this artistic proposal is the apprehension of a distributed agency. If agency is distributed among humans and non-humans, it is never the individual that acts, as Latour (referring to François Jullien) has emphasized: “I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do. That which acts through me is also surprised by what I do, by the chance to mutate, to change and to bifurcate, the chance that I and the circumstances surrounding me offer to that which has been invited, recovered, welcomed.”5 Layes invents and creates situations that enable activity that springs from the things themselves and that emphasises their fragility and intractability. Even if the objects are well- prepared (one chair leg is longer than the other one, the bottle has a hole in its bottom and so on) and act in the way they do precisely because they are not conventional things, it is crucial that the scenes are choreographed in such a way that allows for these things to act or to oppose the intentions of the performers.
With his performances, Clément Layes has created systems in which things are in a staged state of uncontrollability. Of course it is a subject that is responsible for their staging – however, the objects are involved in such a way that they can potentially co-determine the course of the performance and so that they have concrete effects on other (non-)human performers. The performers, who designate the world of objects, who (re-)arrange the latter, and who discard things, are related to and attracted by the non-human things surrounding them in complex ways. They are labourers, collectors, constructors, those who dispose of waste and those who appropriate stuff. What 'Things that surround us' thematizes are questions of political ecology. It is not the human body, the mobility of the subject and its identity that are the focus of Layes' choreographic cycle of things, rather it is the interrelation of subjects and the world that surrounds them.
At the heart of this investigation there is the question how human beings form and shape their environment and how the latter forms human beings.
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1 Clément Layes in an unpublished interview wih Martina Ruhsam in the frame of her PHD research on 8.3. 2015 in Berlin.
2 Cf. Barad, Karen:Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2007, p. 147
Compared to an interaction, an intra-action is the encounter of two entities or things that makes these entities/things emerge as such in the first place. Barad assumes that the relata do not exist prior to their relations but are engendered by their encounter.
3 Boris Groys: Comrades of Time, in: Going Public, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010, p. 90.
4 Cf. Latour, Bruno: Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge/ Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 81.
5 Latour, Bruno: Pandora´s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge/ Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 281.
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