Newly arrived publications on animals and more. Come read at Bungee Space.
Through the philosophy of human exceptionalism we try to distance ourselves from animals, yet we absorb them into our bodies and lives in a variety of complex and intimate ways: we live with animals, eat animals, wear them, look at them, paint and write about them, mourn them, even bury our dead animals in pet cemeteries with plaques that lament their loss. How do we explain our contradictory relationship with nonhuman animals? (Creed & Reesink, 2015)
Oolong
a Japanese rabbit whose unusually flat head made it ideal for balancing objects
While clearing out his mother’s house, Campeau discovered a strange image amongst her possessions: a piglet in a restaurant, being fed milk by a customer. Some time later, he stumbled across another, similar picture by accident. Intrigued Campeau decided to seek out more of these piglet mascots. His quest yielded over 200 images, the most striking of which are collected here.
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This is a book of obsessions; both Campeau’s own and that of the original piglet snapper. All pictures are taken in restaurant ‘Au Lutin Qui Bouffe’ in Montreal led by patron Mr McAbbie.
Pets, companions, beasts of burden, bloodsport fighters, food…Akira Lippit states that
modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity’s habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity’s reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis and technological media such as the telephone, film, and radio. (Lippit, 2000, pp. 2-3.)
Human beings instrumentalize and anthropomorphize nonhuman animals with arrogance and ignorance bred from Humans' enduring domination of the earth, primarily for political or entertainment purposes, sometimes self-manifesting. Is it possible to let the animal itself stand for the story?
Dogs
Dog breeds, human races: there have been several historical moments when dog and national identity came to intersect intentionally or unintentionally. Empathy toward dog breeding seemed to alleviate the impertinence of conditioning nations with human races.
No Country for Canine (the Chinese title “馴國” literally means “Domestication of nations”) is like a session of ring toss: putting aside the animal that cannot make a voice (dog), artificial object (ceramic) shaped after them and the history of producer (man) in an attempt to land the ring around the tiny peg situated at the intersection of the three.
The human and the horse share a long history together. At first horses were working animals, serving as a means of transport in agriculture and in war. Nowadays, horses are domestic pets with a moral status: used for recreation, in competitions, and for medical therapy.
Heleen Peeters broadly documented and investigated horse (meat) culture in Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, Kyrgyzstan, the United States and Canada. Why is horse meat becoming less popular? What happens to horses if they are no longer eaten? How do we relate to animals in the first place? And what about the need to cut back on our meat consumption?
A standard method is used worldwide to photograph cows and bulls. These photographs allow farmers to examine the qualities of different types of breeds in order to facilitate mating and the propagation of different family lines. Useful Photography #005 presents the legendary bull Lord Lily, alongside a small selection of his more than 150.000 descendants.
Late on 13 June 2015 heavy rainfalls hit Tbilisi and the nearby areas. By the morning, 19 people would be dead. Many families were now homeless, a zoo destroyed, and a city in shock. The city became a wilderness full of dangerous beasts. The zoo lost more than 300 animals. The majority, killed by flooding. Several survivors — a hippopotamus, big cats, wolves, bears, and hyenas—escaped from destroyed pens and cages to the streets of Tbilisi. Some were killed, others recaptured and brought back to the zoo.
“Bestiary of Corona Animals” is an essay that illuminates the causal relations between the human tendency to objectify the world, the continuous expansion of extractive activity, the trace effects of the current climate regime, and the outbreak of the current coronavirus pandemic.
Animal Books for...
Lous Martens has five grandchildren – Jaap, Zeno, Anna, Julian, and Luca – and has begun making an animal scrapbook for each newcomer to the family. Although it is seventeen years since the first, Jaap, was born, none of the five books are finished yet.
Interestingly, the books were never intended to be published, but are now grouped into one big volume, an embodiment of familial love and dedication.
Consisting of loosely pasted pictures of animals that were clipped from newspapers and magazines about art, literature, and science, plus stamps and photographs from advertising brochures, the books are enjoyable for their small, ever-evolving changes as new material is added.
Creed, Barbara; Reesink, Maarten: Animals, images, anthropocentrism. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 4 (2015), Nr. 1, S. 95–105. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15174.
Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
