A hermit crab housed in a broken glass bottle or inside a plastic cap is becoming like a polar bear stranded on a tiny, melting iceberg: those pictures are emergent icons of the plight faced by oceans and creatures, caused by human waste excesses and wrongdoings. These inventive crustaceans fulfill a warning role akin to charismatic megafauna, and induce empathy with varied sources, dominated by human projections like the housing crisis metaphor. Crabs emerge like a cluster where many opposed notions collapse, while they stage the frictions of a complex, fractured balance. They are wild animals, and controversial companion animals, and when they live inside human trash, they show resilience that questions the natural-artificial divide. Simultaneously, they remind humans of strains imposed upon them, the oceans, and the planet, becoming tokens of the unbalances with which humans have to deal in their often-misguided attempts to fix the things they are rupturing.
Mirar a los (demás) animales es una actividad humana muy extendida, sea en un sentido más tangible, o más conceptual, como por ejemplo hace W. J. T. Mitchell en su ensayo “Illusion: Looking at Animals Looking”. Según una de las conclusiones y propuestas de este autor, quizás tendríamos que volver a aprender cómo mirar a los animales. Tal y como llevan décadas haciendo los estudios animales, este artículo se acerca a las perspectivas de éstos, y en concreto, de las aves, para tratar de considerarlos en sus propios términos, más allá de los términos humanos. Para ello, reúne una serie de historias mediante las cuales dialoga con el texto y la estructura planteada por Mitchell no sólo para mirar a las aves mirar, sino también ejercer su agencia, y hacer. Incluso ilusionismo, y arte, desdibujando con ello los límites entre animales humanos y no humanos.
A way to reflect about political ecology in East Asia is to explore the vibrant ecologies that have been created and recreated by two contemporary artists who have worked with non-human animals and called them collaborators: Liang Shaoji (Shanghai, 1945) and Yukinori Yanagi (Fukuoka, 1959). Liang, who has devoted his life to silkworms and Yanagi, who has worked extensively with ants, have both addressed the connections between the tiny (those small insects) and the huge (the entire planet) and thus stressed the relevance of all animal agencies, human or non-human. According to the approach of this special issue, to analyse their works I will rely on animal studies, which offer significant contributions to the study of contemporary art. In this light, I read their artistic proposals as an attempt to raise empathy and to advocate that every being, big or small, deserves the same consideration and is linked to any other; being this a continuum that does not have to be disrupted by barriers, dichotomies, pigeonholes and hierarchies.
En el libro publicado en 1983 How to Imagine: a Narrative on Art and Agriculture, que toma la forma de un largo monólogo urdido en presencia del autor Henry Martin (y luego traducido por él), la voz del artista Gianfranco Baruchello bosquejaba lo que habían supuesto para él, para su vida y su trayectoria artística, los ochos años de la granja Agricola Cornelia (1973-1981) de los que se nutre esta exposición. Comisariada por Maria Alicata y Daniela Zanoletti, esta muestra conmemora no sólo esta experiencia, sino que también actúa como un homenaje al nacimiento y a las dos décadas de vida de la Fondazione Baruchello, instaurada en 1998 por el propio artista y Carla Subrizi.
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