Ghost B178
BY Miriam Simun
10.09.2022
Guided by the artist Miriam Simun through the Pléiades forests, we went for a two-hour moonlight hike/performance in the area of Lynx B178, last seen in the area in 2017.
Ghost B178 (Welcome to The Contact Zone)
Welcome to the Contact Zone. Because the Zone is constantly changing, a satellite or drone perspective would not be enough to reveal all its secrets, and therefore must be surveyed. The Zone is the place where the here and the elsewhere overlap and merge. It is in this space that we will seek contact: with the ghosts of the translocated wilderness; with sensitive, glitching, sense-making machines; with the thin line between love and domination; with what we take and what we owe; with what we do not know and what we know is elusive.
It is believed that the last “originally wild” lynx in Switzerland was killed in 1894. In the 1970s, 34 lynx were captured in the Slovak part of the Carpathians, quarantined, radio-tagged, transported and released in the Jura Mountains and the Swiss Alps. The lynx is a very cryptic animal, difficult to spot especially to human eyes. A descendant of one of these wild cats, named B178 by its observers/protectors, has settled in a 150sq km area around Les Pléiades and was last seen by a human technical appendage in 2017. Since then, no one knows if it was hunted or if it still roams.
Ghost B178 is a slow, downhill, two-hour hike through the known territory of this Eurasian lynx. We will walk sometimes in one direction, sometimes in the other, trying to perceive through concentration and deconcentration. With and without technical appendages we will explore the limits of our senses. We will use this moment to reflect on the biopolitical regimes and narratives of belonging that try to control the lives, migrations and deaths of all kinds of life forms on the European continent – but also of all those lives that nevertheless manage to escape.