Bats

On Tuesday, I went to listen to Jeremy Deller in conversation with Front Row’s John Wilson at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). Deller’s Bat House Project – a competition to design a home for bats in London’s Wetlands Centre - is one of the RSA/ACE Arts and Ecology commissions.

In his presentation, Deller talked about his fascination with bats (illustrated by an image of a bat skeleton that looked convincingly human) and showed images from work that informed the Arts and Ecology project. This included Memory Bucket (2003) a sort of socio-political mapping of Texas, taking in the Waco siege, Willie Nelson and a café that members of the Bush administration have courted local support in. The film ends with a beautiful drama of 300,000+ bats leaving their caves at dusk to hunt for food in the high air streams. The cultural perception of bats as apocalyptic and sinister could not be avoided, yet Deller undermines this, positing them as some kind of ‘natural cleansing’ for the film in contrast to the human 'stupidness' that had gone before.

His respect for bats is mirrored in the Bat House Project. The configuration of interests in this project – it’s artist initiated, built by architects, for a non-human client and funded by a property developer – make it a complex mediation on notions of home, nature and land. I look forward to my first visit.

Miranda Pope, Associate Curator