Notes on Roommates (a dog, a parrot, a whale and a canal)

In the summer of 2022, a Beluga whale strayed into the river Seine and began swimming towards Paris. It was stopped by a lock, refused to eat and was subsequently euthanised. Nobody knows when parrots entered Parisian airspace, but they have been observed in the French capital since the 1970s. They can now be seen in most of Paris’s public parks, from the Bois de Boulogne in the west to the Bois de Vincennes in the east. And dogs - well, dogs have been roaming Parisian streets since forever. Terriers, Dachshunds, Spaniels, and of course, the French Bulldog. 
These stories of animals adapting to urban environments lay at the heart of Sophia Mainka’s video and sculpture installation, “Notes on Roommates (a dog, a parrot, a whale and a canal)” produced and first shown during her residency at Fondation Fiminco in Paris. Amid the organic playful forms of the metal sculptures there are three videos, all filmed from the animal perspective. In the first two, Mainka paints her arms and hands to resemble a dog’s paws, and we see these on screen as the fictional dog walks, stops and occasionally runs around the cobblestones and concrete pavements, once even jumping from a wooden bench. In the third, she takes on the perspective of the whale, the camera capturing what the whale would have seen, providing it swam further, into the city canals. The image rises and dips to the rhythm of the whale’s breathing. Surrounding us are the sounds of birds singing, except this too is staged: these are not parrots, but a toy, a bird whistle device. 
Her work then, could be described as ethological in spirit. Sophia Mainka does not imitate animals, but rather behaves like them. She scratches, she sniffs, she swims, she trills and peeps. She acts the way an animal would act, if she were a animal in this situation and in this sense, we can think of her work in terms of what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call becoming. 
For Deleuze and Guattari, the process of becoming-animal is best described by Vladimir Slepian in his short text, “Fils de Chien.” Written in the first person, Slepian confesses how, despite being a man, his hunger leads him to behave like a dog, putting shoes on his hands and tying them using his mouth. It is a reversal of the evolutionary process described by anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in which humans, through their adoption of an upright posture, free their mouths from the task of grasping and develop speech. Slepian recomposes himself, so that his mouth instead of speaking, grasps like a dog's. And it is irrelevant how this dog looks like, whether this is the short snout of a bulldog or longer nose of a dachshund. 
Similarly, Mainka makes us rethink our relation to nature, which is redrawn along affective lines as a participatory process. Animals are not considered as distinct molar entities, standing alongside the human. All entities are defined by their capacity to act, which changes depending on how they affect and how they are affected by others. There is a sensing of utopia in the environs of the Canal Saint-Martin that Mainka would walk along so happily - a secluded, sheltered place of inter-species co-existence. Or rather, it is a place where different populations, human, mammal and bird, continually compose and re-compose together.