Animal Instinct

Tribe-F is a schizophrenic artists’ collective from Serbia — a country that is unambiguously European and yet has spent a century at Europe’s most contested edges, absorbing and enduring what that position costs. The figures that populate and overflow the surfaces and assemblages of Tribe-F are neither human nor animal, neither earthly nor purely extraterrestrial, neither there nor here — or rather, they are both at once, in states of permanent, ecstatic becoming. These are not monsters. Monsters are what the frightened call things they cannot categorise. These are Aliens, Unknowns, Hybrids — and as any port town of an island with centuries of connection to the overseas understands, hybridity is simply what happens when life is allowed to move freely across borders. An alien species is one that has established itself somewhere it did not originate, often transforming the ecosystem in the process — for better, for worse, for both at once. In the register of the uncanny, the alien is whatever we cannot recognise in the shape that confronts us. Tribe-F’s creatures hold both meanings simultaneously. They are the figure of the other — and they are also us, in those moments when we sense that our own edges are less fixed than we pretend.

This is the gift, and the provocation, of schizophrenic collective vision. The diagnostic literature describes schizophrenia as a disorder of reality-testing — a failure to distinguish reliably between self and world, inside and outside, the literal and the symbolic. What the diagnostic literature tends not to linger over is the creativity this permeability makes possible. When the membrane between categories is thin, when the border is porous, things get through that never would have cleared customs in a more guarded mind. The members of Tribe-F are not artists despite their diagnoses. They are artists through the specific quality of attention their diagnoses permit — or perhaps impose.

Come close to these works. Let them be strange to you. Let the half-human eye meet yours without the comfort of a label. Notice what you feel — the recoil, yes, but also the recognition. Something in us knows these creatures. Something in us has always lived at that border, between the animal body and the thinking mind, between the self we perform and the self that slips through in dreams. The artists of Tribe-F live there more openly than most. They have made the border visible. They have made it inhabitable.

Harwich knows about borders exciting to inhabit, exciting to cross. The sea is one. Art is another.