Rae Teitelbaum. A Body of Many

Rae Teitelbaum’s practice investigates ways of imagining and enacting forms of existence in relation to human and more-than-human worlds. Informed by queer, trans, intersectional feminist, and decolonial thought, their work brings embodied, collaborative modes of knowing into conversation with the places, bodies and beings that inhabit the Iberian Peninsula. Their research asks how such connections might be collectively experienced and reimagined, creating openings  for alternative modes of living together.

For this performance, Teitelbaum places shepherding centre-stage, approaching it simultaneously as a lived practice and an imaginative proposition. Shepherding becomes a lens through which to consider care, migration, gender, and our entanglement with more-than-human life.

Wool forms a central thread within this inquiry. Collected from rural communities in Portugal and transformed through felting, it retains traces of animals, land, labour, and the legacy of an industry that has largely vanished. The artist treats wool as a substance marked by ecological, economic, and colonial histories. Through sound, movement, and collective presence, these histories progressively give shape to the notion of a “body of many”: a plurality held together through networks of care, reciprocity, and interdependence.

This exploration extends to Antoni Tàpies’s Mitjó [Sock], the discarded, controversial sculpture that Teitelbaum reclaims as a site of possibility. Its holes become apertures onto transformation, futurity, and other forms of relation. The performance draws us into this opening: not beyond the world, but deeper into its intricate web of dependencies.

Activity programmed as part of the Museu Tàpies series Following the Sun, entitled Uncovering the Gaze, curated by Carolina Ciuti.