Picnic methodology: rethinking multispecies relationships through alfresco meals

Abstract

This essay introduces a speculative “picnic methodology” emerging from site-specific performance art practice with a herd of reindeer. The practice expands from the justice-oriented picnic tradition and stages picnic as a space to envision nonhierarchical multispecies relationships. The picnic blanket is offered as a meeting place to appreciate more-than-human ways of being, thinking, and knowing, starting with our relative, the reindeer. The essay draws from the short film City Reindeer (2022), documenting the durational picnics in the wintery Arctic. The performance art practice forms here a contemplative and playful intervention to decenter the human and give the reindeer a voice, with an underlying commitment to promoting veganism.