Tracing rat paths: in search of interspecies performance is a companion to my artistic thesis Rat City. Rat City was a site-specific, interspecies performance that took place in Myllypuro, Helsinki in September 2023. In this thesis, I open up the performance process and consider more broadly what interspecies can mean in the context of performance art. My main questions are how a performance could be made together with urban rats, Rattus Norvegicus. How could authorship be shared with a wild species that simultaneously lives in close proximity to humans and avoids them? How does taking other species seriously as a co-creator of a performance affect the content, the form and the very notion of what a performance can be?

At the beginning of the thesis, I define interspecies performance based on the writings and theories of Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Tuija Kokkonen, Jessica Ullrich, Una Chaudhuri, and Lisa Jevbratt, and place it in the context of posthumanism and animal studies. I consider the performance as an arena, or a "more-than-human contact zone", where humans and non-humans can encounter, change, and transform each other. Next, I approach interspecies performance from three perspectives: art-science collaboration, rat-human collaboration and site-specificity. Each of these "lines of inquiry" raises new questions and new conceptual tools for thinking about interspecies performance, eventually intertwining and leading to the Rat City performance, which I will describe in the final chapter.

Through questions about interspecies collaboration — and through the rats themselves — I discovered the "politics of entanglements", in which many other things besides rats started to matter. One of the main findings of this thesis is this "making things matter" in and through interspecies performance. Meaning-making occurs through both active work (learning to read rat writing, participating in research events) and passive being and passing time. It requires an understanding of the "other", but also an understanding of one's own agency in relation to the other. This multifaceted understanding requires multiple knowledges, surrender to affect, various forms of empathy and reflection on one's own actions. This discovery also opens up the process that led to the Rat City performance from a new perspective: the process was not so much a "rehearsal period" culminating in a work presented to a (human) audience, but a durational performance that is actually still ongoing.