Camille Auer & Emil Santtu Uuttu: Ruff Knowledge
Artist Camille Auer's and dramaturg Emil Santtu Uuttu's avian performance lecture Ruff Knowledge is coming to Belfast as part of Outburst festival 2025 this November.
Homosexual behavior and gender diversity are common phenomena in nature, yet they receive very little visibility in media about nature. The ruff (Calidris pugnax) is perhaps the most diverse wild vertebrate species. During the breeding season, male ruffs all look strikingly different from each other while also resembling females in some cases. Ruffs have several distinct morphs that have different sexual behaviours and strategies, yet these birds are generally categorized into two sexes and their behavior is assumed to be motivated by heterosexual reproduction.
Humans tend to make circular arguments when observing nature, interpreting natural observations through their values, then using this version of nature to justify what’s “natural”.
Ruff Knowledge asks, how do we know about birds? What do birds want? How do they experience sex and sexuality? Can we know what it’s like to be a bird? Would that knowledge change our relationship with birds and the world? What happens in humans when observing birds? And what happens in the birds being observed and observing us back?
Photo: Tani Simberg
People behind the project
Camille Auer
Camille Auer is such a fucking bitch. No. She's a poet. A writer. She has been an artist. She has worked with moving image and sound, performance, installation, words and concepts. She emerges when someone is being transphobic, to be a bitch. Camille Auer once abandoned her art career for three years to study birds and ornithological literature to figure out what kind of biases humans have in their knowledge of birds. Turns out, many. Then she, of course, made an artwork about it. Because when you're in the art game, you're in the art game. Fuck.
Emil Santtu Uuttu
Emil Santtu Uuttu’s writing and stage works explore deep time, constant change, and pleasure, or the role of memory institutions and historical research. Uuttu’s first play Ihana tytär Erika – Huomioita nimestä (Lovely Daughter Erika – Notes on a Name, translated by Roy Boswell) was awarded both the Archival Act of the Year 2023 and the Lea Prize 2024.