UURGA SHIG documents the worldview of another stick. For the Land Art Mongolia Biennial (2014) I co-habited with a pole lasso called the ‘uurga’. I attempted the impossible task of becoming this lasso, which is used by herdsmen to reign in wild horses on the Mongolian Steppe and to communicate with the horses they are riding. The uurga lasso also extends further into human language and practices of fortune – for instance to be uurga-shig (literally “lasso-like” in Mongolian) refers to the practice of a man chasing a woman into marriage. The resulting work teases and inverts the assumptions of permanence associated with Western land art, and reflects upon my primary association with the lasso that's native to the Adobe Photoshop toolbar.

Presented as a two-channel video captured from the point of view of both the rider and the horse at once, here the viewer is invited to step into the space of the lasso, negotiating between the perspectives of human and animal.

Link to project exhibited online through UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab: https://www.uclmal.com/hermione-spriggs

The text “Urga Shig: What is it like to be a lasso?”, published in the Journal of Material Culture, presents a detailed account of this project. With thanks to Rebecca Empson.

link to text: 
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1359183516662673

link to exhibition:
www.titanik.fi/hermione-spriggs-heini-nieminen-laura-cooper-third-house/