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Kira O’Reilly, inthewrongplaceness, 2009. Performance for the opening of sk-interfaces at Casino Luxembourg. Photo credit: Axel Heise

inthewrongplaceness is an intimate performance that Kira O’Reilly developed on her return from a residency at SymbioticA in 2004. The impact of working with pig’s tissue in a lab setting instigated her thoughts on the similarities between the pig’s skin and her own. By inviting members of the audience to approach one by one and touch both her own and the skin of a dead, nonhuman animal, O’Reilly encourages visitors to engage with the complexities of the relationships between skin, touch and species. The artist also explained in an interview: It was also very much influenced by a book called Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq, about a woman who turns into a pig. She spends quite some time in the middle of the text oscillating through in between stages, neither entirely one nor the other.