Combining video and performance-oriented text, this genre-bending o-pei-la is a multispecies enactment of experimental natural history. Our players consider the golden treasure snail (金寶螺 kim-pó-lê; Pomacea canaliculata and relatives; golden apple snail), first imported to Taiwan from Argentina in 1979 for an imagined escargot industry, but now a major pest of rice agriculture in Taiwan and across Asia. Whereas farmers in the Green Revolution’s legacy use poison to exterminate snails, a new generation of friendly farmers (友善小農; youshan xiaonong) in Taiwan’s Yilan County hand-pick snails and attempt to learn enough about their lives to insert farming as one among many multispecies life ways within the paddy.
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Written by Anna Tsing
Directed by Thomas Bostock
Produced by Holly Shuttleworth
Performed by Phoebe Naughton, Cordelia Stevenson and Nancy Ofori
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