A Tendering of Ethics. Performance, capacity and desire

‘Performance and ethics are very different processes, but both can be seen as desires for change, and as relational. Performance is relational through time, through images, through direct bodily encounters, through the senses and a physical closeness to another being, entity or landscape.

Both performance and ethics are practices which create a world, which create what it is possible to know. Relational ethics afford an immediacy in experience, a feeling for context rather than a system of judgement, a particular connection between the human self and an other… Considering nature within a relational ethic, that starting approach to creating a world can be one of care, regard, concern, or tender in its Shakespearean usage’.

key words: ethics, Jim Cheney, social sculpture

at BETWEEN NATURE, Lancaster University 2000