PISS PONY
I ate equine-conjugated oestrogens; I drank pooled mares' urine, literally; but I did not conjugate well with the horses themselves. Shame is a prod to lifelong rethinking and recrafting one's accountabilities.*
I pissed in the corner of the stable tracing the line of her legs as hot streams splashed my thighs - horses have no muscles below the knee, only ligament, tendon, and bone. We reached under her belly, licked a single drop of milk. When a horse grooms your newly shaved head - hair on the bathroom floor, hands on your neck - (horses love buzzcuts, this is an observable and irrevocable fact) it feels amazing, but sometimes you do have to ask the horse to be careful at the moment when I feel her teeth start scraping bone.
...one of the most common Hormone Replacement Therapies - especially in America - is STILL made from pregnant mares urine**because pregnant horse piss contains this magical oestrogen - like the medication is literally Called 'Premarin and these horses are kept pregnant all their lives, their babies born and shot or sometimes sold and Premarin is used by menopausal and transgender women and we can park this idea but like we only need to drink one cup of pregnant mare's piss a year in order to transition, and maybe there are other ways to live with horses and their children outside of tiny stalls in which they piss and piss and die.
*Haraway, D. (2012). Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin® in Multispecies Response-ability. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(1/2), 301–316. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2333346
**Colin G. Scanes, 2018, "Animal Attributes Exploited by Humans (Nonfood Uses of Animals)" in Colin G. Scanes, Samia R. Toukhsati (eds), Animals and Human Society, USA: Academic Press, pp 13-40.
& JOAN OF ARC (performance, text)
& GROUND/DEATH/AGRICULTURE (16mm film,html)
& EMPIRE (sculpture, drawing)
& LESBIANS (bags
PISS PONY began with a set of photographs produced as part of the Feldversuche Symposium in Vienna. These were photographs of horses I spent time with every day on my residency, taken with a disposable camera I left to soak in a jar of piss and menstrual blood.
Later, I produced a moving image proposal for a research project thinking through relationships between horses and oestrogen via Premarin HRT medication, with a particular focus on entanglements of menstruation; hormones, and exclusionary (fascist) definitions of femininity and womanhood; towards a horse/human utopia of living together in the OUTSIDE. This video was exhibited at a performance event Flat Time House in August 2024. Elements of this research are also part of Peasant girls can’t ride a warhorse or the saddle sores of Joan of Arc.
Email me for the full video.
EXHIBITIONS:
Feldversuche Symposium 24, Kleine Stadt Farm, Vienna, 2024
DE-PRODUCTION – FIRST TRIMESTER MOURNING SICKNESS, Flat Time House, 2024.
PUBLICATIONS:
'Piss Horse' in The PostHumanist (forthcoming).
piss pony, disposable camera soaked in artist's piss and menstrual blood, 2024// PISS HORSE (WIP), video still, 2024, //piss pony, disposable camera soaked in artist's piss and menstrual blood, aluminium print, A0, installed on the muckheap at Kleine Stadt Farm for the Feldversuche Symposium, Vienna, 2024