Jake Starr premieres their new eco-horror film, A Weak & Panicked Animal at Syrup Contemporary. SYRUP_002 OPEN 11AM - 4PM THURSDAYS, FRIDAYS & SATURDAYS 11 MAY - 1 JUNE 20 FAR STREET MARRICKVILLE Enclosed by a civilised landscape, society reduces the problem of human survival to a minimum. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing, demarcate a treaty between man and nature whereby neither one of us shall pass these thresholds lest we become subject to the law of the other. Collating an archive of CCTV, police body-cam footage and local news reports documenting urban confrontations with wild deer, A Weak & Panicked Animal (2024) considers the precarious borders between human and non-human territories and our response to infringements upon entrenched anthropocentric conventions. Through the framework of Anna Tsing’s concept of contamination, these often-violent encounters can be understood to fundamentally undermine and transform our pre-existing relations with the non-human world. In these encounters we witness an eruption of the real, experienced with great affect by those confronted by these interspecies intrusions. The spatial order of civilisation and wilderness is literally and metaphorically shattered as these deer burst through the very glass panes designed to keep the unruly forces of nature separate from our human sanctuaries. The deer, symbolic of natural purity, embodies a wildness now foreign and certainly unwelcome to the experience of urbanised human life. When confronted by such wild beasts within our civilised landscapes we are shocked, fearful, unsure of how to appropriately respond to such unexpected proximity with this non-human other. Witnesses scramble for cover in a panicked flight, law enforcement officers struggle to apprehend animal intruders, wildlife protection services draw their weapons and legal professionals lay out appropriate charges. Our response to these non-human visitations lays out the absurdity of anthropocentric constructs and our inadequacy in addressing the inextricable reality that we too, are animals in a chaotic planetary ecosystem. We are reminded that our colonies of sterility, our institutions of control and our conditions of social order, do not divorce us from the wild’s will to power.