Everywhere animals appear: non-human fables in the land of lenses
Andersdotter, Sara (2020) Everywhere animals appear: non-human fables in the land of lenses. In: The Animal Gaze Constructed, 6-7 March 2020, London Metropolitan University, London, UK. (Unpublished)
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“Everywhere animals disappear”, John Berger writes in Why Look at Animals? (Berger 1980/2009 36), referencing Grandville’s Public and Private Lives of Animals (Thompson 1877), where we find animals in various guises, dressed as humans. Berger referred to this as “putting on a mask, but its function was to unmask” (Berger 1980/2009 28). This paper considers the proximity to the animal Other in representations of the self on social media. Dog tongues, cat ears, deer antlers and rabbit noses merge and intersect with the features of humans; strange “interstices between different sets of the visible” (Berger 1980/2009, 10) created for new forms of self-representation. This paper explores the use, meanings and implications of these images, and what acts of masking and unmasking can be discerned in these practices. In parallel, the research considers how artists reflect on and embody the non-human experience, and how philosophical strategies of ‘fictioning’ and ‘fabulation’ (O'Sullivan & Burrows 2019) can be used to explore Other, non-human subjectivities.
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