Cycling with Animals is a durational project for public space. Created by Action Hero (UK) and Mia & Eric (CA), Cycling With Animals brings together elements of gameplay, intervention, and poetics to interrogate municipal bylaws that govern public spaces. Over a period of two weeks, the team laboriously cuts up different sections of a city’s bylaws into individual words and then painstakingly re-assemble them into strange accidental poetry that acts as scripts for future public actions. These new poetic bylaws are entirely spontaneous, unpredictable and unique to the city they’re working in.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis are an artist team from Calgary, Alberta. We bring together elements of craft, performance, and cultural geography to create site-specific and socially-engaged works. Thematically our practice deals with urban and rural ecologies, social relationships, and place-based knowledge production. Throughout the last nine years, we have developed a practice that operates in both a gallery and a public context. Our projects, workshops, artist talks, and lectures have been presented in formal and DIY festivals, galleries, and postsecondary institutions throughout North America and in Europe.
Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse share an interdisciplinary performance practice together under the name Action Hero. Since 2005, they have created performances spanning theatre, live art, installation, multimedia and site-specific practice, which have toured to nearly 30 countries across 5 continents. Action Hero’s work is always experimenting with form, and as a result, their work expands across multiple creative practices. Although they work primarily with live performance, we regularly work with processes and mediums with which we are unfamiliar, adopting a radical DIY approach that often sees them navigating through new technical and creative territories.
CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Performers: (Co-creators) Gemma Paintin, James Stenhouse, Mia Rushton, Eric Moschopedis
Photography by the Artists, courtsey of Springboard Performance.