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Steph Joyce

is a transdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. They have a research-based artistic practice, which tends towards situational gatherings and site-specific installations with video, performative, and sculptural elements. For now, thinking-with embodied research methods, theories of affect and multispecies care, and collective practices is important to them.

steph-joyce.com


Installation view of GBB_edits #3: Desire Across the Disciplines, exhibition area of Kunsthochschule Kassel 2024.
Photos: Lucas Melzer



Research Project: Slippery

A video installation as an entry point into process-based research on refusal as learned with eels

Thinking cautiously with eels is a slippery endeavor. With slippery I mean not easy to grasp, elusive and changing, but also smooth and wet.

I’ve never actually met an eel, or seen an eel, not in a zoo, an aquarium or at a river’s edge — and I don’t know that I have to or necessarily want to. I already know we’re inter­dependent, our stories interwoven. The eels who surround me, and probably you, are European eels, migratory fish in danger of extinction. A nearly fatal fate determined not by chance, but rather by the unhampered violence of colonialist extractivism and capitalist imaginaries.

Eels have long evaded scientific knowledge production methods, embodying a form of resistance to classification and control. They refuse to thrive in captivity, refuse to repro­duce for human consumption and refuse to be held. They famously frustrated Freud as a young scientist, keen on researching their repr

oductive organs that had yet to develop – too queer for him to understand.

When I spoke about this project with an acquaintance, whose literary theory orbits violence and futurity, he was most curious to know how I’d navigate a common percep­tion of eels as abject. But there are more ways to encounter not-knowing than with fear disguised as disgust.

This work embraces study and process more than production and completion, so what you’re seeing is an entry point, an inhale/exhale, an attempt to imagine, unlearn, relearn and resist with eels, something to let run through your fingers.

Text: Steph Joyce, für die Publikation GBB_edits #3