Marcus Coates (B. 1968, UK)
The Plover’s Wing, 2009

Coates consults the Mayor of Holon on Palestine/Israeli crisis through a shamanic ritual.

I guess, this is just another of all the works in this collection that I am deliberately going to misinterpret. I don’t really know what to make of the political framing of the piece – is it just an attempt to claim the benefits of ticking the social relevance box, or if there is some genuine engagement in the matter, or just some random coincidence… And I don’t really know what to think of the shamanist framing either. There are many human practices in a variety of spheres of human activity beyond the religion – sports, arts, psychology etc. – that makes use of trance, getting “into the zone”, “the bubble” etc in order to experience something, achieve something or come to an insight or a decision about something. I have no clue if they are radically different, but my guess would be that they are all variations of the same.

And on occasion I do describe my own practice as divination. I make something and then I am trying to make sense of it. I’d guess, it is not very different from fortune-telling from the tea-leaves. Different framing, different interest, but largely the same method – trying to decode something that was never intentionally coded to start with.

And impersonating an animal can be quite helpful sometimes – e.g. like in my Stray in Concertina or Stray Jam where I am impersonating a puppy as a means to explore facets of the world that I find confusing as a human. A kind of shift of perspective that allows see something differently, possibly to drop some baggage, possibly to collect another – but rendering difference in perception that can be insightful or otherwise interesting.