Make, Shift
May 5–19
Political Animals & Scatter, Enclosure (The Herd Comes Down to Dream)
Luca E. Lum
August 21 – 22, 2026
H0thouse, Aliwal Arts Centre, Singapore
Political Animals continues artist and writer Luca E. Lum’s (SMACT ’25) exploration into the animal and machine as figures that parse anticipation and catastrophe as part of her larger inquiry about nonhumanity, mediation, and time. For the presentation at h0thouse, she returns more specifically to the figure of the animal as encountered through animal media. This formal experiment combines elements of a lecture, poetry, and scenography, to examine the ways the figure of the animal makes its appearances and appeals amid ecological, social, and political uncertainty and crisis. What is the animal as a genre of address? She interrogates her own encounters with animals and animal media, ranging from archival material, talk show segments, and Tik Tok tutorials, curious about the ways animals form the medium, agent, and scale, through which the social and political is metabolized and engineered. The presentation loosely plays with the idea of a media control room, making use of h0thouse’s set up as a design studio and experimental play space.
The presentation contains elements of Luca’s ongoing project Scatter, Enclosure (The Herd Comes Down to Dream), which looks at the history of extirpation (localised extinction) and rewilding of the Milu deer (Père David’s deer) in China. What began as a way to re-enter writing after the death of her father, has expanded to consider the notions of herd and ecological assemblages of memory and mourning, how death impacts language, and how the forms of an animal’s range and enclosure form not only spatial values but temporal ones. Early writing from this is featured in Making Kin: Animals (cthulhu books, the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid).
The lecture performance Political Animals takes place on 21 August 2026, followed by a brief discussion with the artist.
A reading of passages from Scatter, Enclosure (The Herd Comes Down to Dream) will take place during the Open Studios, 22 August 2026.
View her ongoing research and further details for the event here: https://h0t.house/presentations/luca-e-lum
