Donkey

anorak, Lukas Ludwig, James Rushford

Essay & Audiobook published on Before Law, a web-based artist project by BAMBITCHELL (Sharlene Bamboat & Alexis Mitchell)

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Taking the form of an essay and audiobook Donkey is a fragment of a curatorial research project—an engagement with the donkey as cultural product, with melancholy and affirmation, of the carrying of heavy loads and the relieving of burdens, of
language and the desire to refuse, of power and devotion, of mysticism and mystical transfiguration. Donkey is an object of projection, a mirror of desires. Donkey is a vessel that is slowly filled and rapidly emptied.

The hour-long audio book version is complemented with music by Lukas Ludwig and composer and musician James Rushford who generously gave the donkey a voice.

Written during a COVID-lockdown in Spring 2021, Donkey is a means to engage with the author’s own depression, a denial of loneliness, an effort to reinscribe oneself in the world.

The text was initially commisioned for the publication When the seed considered planting itself (Distanz Verlag), edited by Sophia Sadzakov and the HuM Collective.

Larry Johnson

Untitled (Ass), 2007. Color photograph framed, 57.63 x 62.63 x 1.5 inches / 146,4 x 159,1 x 3,8 cm. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Copperplate engraving after B. Porta. Appears in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente (Physiognomic Fragments), Leipzig 1775.

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Donkeys in Entrepierres, France.
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Group of stuffed animals that Alan Alexander Milne purchased for his son Christopher Robin Milne in 1921. Clockwise from bottom left: Tigger, Kanga, Edward Bear (Winnie-the-Pooh), Eeyore, and Piglet.

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Lucius takes human form.

Illustration from a 1345 edition of the Metamorphoses now housed in the Vatican Library in Rome.

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