How can we speak through and about animals when their tongues are unknown and when their sounds are unintelligible to us, human beings? What would they mouth regarding their use and abuse and how would they speak their enragement, resistance, revenge? And what can the aforementioned words reveal when engaging with environmental and feminist politics and poetics, when tracing the resonances with anti-colonial and diasporic studies?

These vexed subjects are, amongst others, at the centre of Janis Rafa’s practice, which brings together various media, from featured films to shorter visual narratives and from immersive environments containing cultural gestures to drawings and texts, in order to create immersive environments and experiences. Her work often uses the relationship between humans and animals to focus on seemingly contradictory schemes such as love, desire, and seduction, but also pain and penetration, power plays and intrusion, trauma and control. The animal often performs as a symbol, an emblem, or a parable, aiming to talk through the multifaceted aspects of historical and psychosocial, of erotic and interpersonal dynamics, longing to provoke one question: Up to which extent can we challenge our senses and vernaculars in order to see through and beyond the obvious?

There are things and non-things; there are ambiences, conducts, gestures that cannot be uttered, transcribed, archived, preserved, or analysed. And not because they don’t have such a desire, but because there are not enough historical, psychosocial, or geopolitical discourses that can hold their voices, their struggles, their pains. Rafa’s practice brings to the forefront all of the world’s appropriations appended on the lives and the bodies of beings whose voices are unheard, by legitimizing other manifestations of agency. And she does so through using a visual language that strives to scream the wills and sorrows that animals more-than-human and more than human beings mouth repetitively.

This language is neither sentimental, nor romantic; it doesn’t exotify the unknown, yet it doesn’t try to understand it either, by using standard means, tools, or symbols. It’s a language rough and abrupt, a language that goes beyond the semantics of what we, human beings, can and will forever be able to understand. It’s an idiolect that goes beyond the established terminologies of feminism and power abuse and environmentalism and eco-fascism. It’s a vernacular invented for finding the unthinkable logos arising from the ones whose psyches will never meet our thoughts, words, vocabularies. Both through her filmic narratives and installative gestures, varying from large-scale sculptures to textual reliefs, Rafa puts together a discourse that resists the profound. What the audience acknowledges as symbols revealing that which resides underneath the surface, for her is a multi-layered, vexed ground aiming to trigger and provoke what’s embodied in our actions, enactments and behavioural systems. Her practice forces us audiences, to speak the words sexual and instinctive and the animal, the woman, the mother; voices muzzled, shrieks loud and clear, whispers mumbling fear and love, tenderness and rage. And yet, what is that you see? In Rafa’s practice it all acts as a mirror stage. Through her immersive environments, her small-scale drawings, and her otherworldly displays of ready-mades, she longs to open up a space for the audience where they can engage with their own agonies, morals, and laws. Her works, turn into a portal, built for hosting other entities and identities to perform their alternative, parallel, or untamed characters in the world. They become vessels, structured to enable the transitional, the transformative, the dreamy, or the dystopian reoccupations of different haptic and non-haptic sites, through excess, always.

Inertia, depression, death and dirt, endless love, unconditional tenderness, a floating in the transcendental, a lingering over pleasure. These exact instincts, the survival forces or social demons that we, humans, are pushing aside, are Rafa’s only reality. And we are invited to be part of it, to enter it whilst being fully awake. And we leave in a state of ecstasy. And animals, as others, surround us, protecting or cursing us with their ribcages and mouths, with their tongues and their hair, with their genitals. In Rafa’s world, all of the bodies are encouraged to perform their existence, speculatively or truly, through their presence or absence, along with their actions, or stillness. As they do, they mouth seizure and control, use and abuse. And all along, they unveil appropriations of lands, occupations of hearts, suspended gasps. They stand in solidarity with the oppressed, revolt against wrongdoings. They speak pity and love, disclose holdings and penetrations, break through mediated conducts. They promise another omnipresent.