Eating Light

Location: Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan

Duration: 20 minutes

his performance explores the fragile boundary between human intention and the non-human world. Standing before a houseplant—raised on a pedestal yet still ordinary—Alex Conway enters a state of staged reciprocity. The hunting fatigues Conway wears recall a history of domination, but here they mark a shift from conquest to care.

Conway subtly animates the plant’s leaves using visible fishing gut. This transparency is essential: the audience can see how the illusion is constructed, yet the suggestion of life persists. The work operates within what Timothy Morton describes as the mesh—the condition in which humans and non-humans are always entangled, even when the connecting threads are literal. The illusion is not intended to deceive, but to reveal how deeply connected these relations already are.

Conway waters the plant with water held in their mouth, and later “consumes” light only to breathe it back toward the leaves. These gestures imagine a shared circuit of energy. When Conway whispers and the leaf trembles from the breath, the performance exposes how readily humans project meaning onto nature, while also revealing a deep desire to feel nature’s presence in return. Bruno Latour’s thinking resonates here: the plant is not treated as a passive object, but as a participant within a network of actions, meanings, and responses shaped together.

As Conway strokes and illuminates the plant, and as it “responds” through a loop of organic sounds, the performance becomes a temporary collaboration—a small, speculative model of coexistence.

Within the context of contemporary practice, the work reflects on an uneasy truth: while humans long for connection with nature, they are also its greatest source of harm. Yet, following Morton and Latour, the performance suggests that new forms of relationship remain possible—ones grounded in attention, entanglement, and responsibility rather than control.