Tina Stefanou, Horse Power 2019, single-channel HD video, black and white, two-channel sound.

Tina Stefanou, Horse Power 2019, single-channel HD video, black and white, two-channel sound, installation view from Performing Textiles at the Ian Potter Museum.

“Stefanou’s retired equines are free in rolling fields, and bedecked with much more glamorous attire: woven networks of bells and keys. They have become carnivalesque creatures, bearing the noisy garb of fools and jesters. Stefanou, whose prima materia is voice, rejuvenates her tired co-composers with sound. She walks among them singing, while they trot and shake their jingling cargo. While Stefanou is interested in multispecies interactions and expanded notions of both composition and care, her costumed horses also reignite imagery of chain mail – that most combative of fabrics, a meshwork of metal. But what kind of battle might Stefanou be inciting these horses to fight with her, or on her behalf? It is, perhaps, the battle against age’s invisibility, the slipping into silence and obscurity of the elderly of all species. Stefanou’s horses, well past their prime, are garbed in what the ecofeminist philosopher Deborah Bird Rose called ‘the bling of life’, or ‘shimmer’. It is a way of saying yes to life, even in old age and especially in the so-called Anthropocene, when, as Rose says, ‘everything you love is being trashed’.” Tessa Laird

Horses : Buster Rhythm, Breeze and Duke.

Cinematography: Andrew Kaineder.

Sound: Joseph Franklin.

Pattern Maker : Rioko Tega.

Equine Specialist: Sacajawea.

Equine Assistant: Sharon Rix.