Animals Are Looking at You

In my artistic research project “Animals Are Looking At You” I focus on nature, looking back, returning our invasive, inquiring, insistent, prejudging, wondering, incidental, negligent gaze. The research question is: What happens to us when we expose ourselves to the gaze of animals?

In his eighth Duino Elegy1) Rainer Maria Rilke describes the human gaze as a sovereign gaze, always fixating and controlling, and setting traps – in contrast to the openness of the gaze of animals.

This sovereign, this colonalising gaze is still dominant in the field of nature observation. In nature documentations and nature photography the human observer controls the situation that is arranged as a trap, with the observing subjects hidden, under cover, pointing their optical instruments at the observed subjects and transforming them into objects.

My project breaks with this tradition. I deliberately look out for the gaze of other-than-humans by entering their visual field and revealing myself as a human animal, as a member of a co-species. The encountered being turns towards me and looks at me, and something happens.

The photographic results of the project force the viewers to face up to these gazes. They point at them, now turning them into objects of observation. Jacques Derrida wrote:

“The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.”2)

Questions arise and start to form, about nature, its gaze, ourselves, our (human) nature and how we might discover ourselves as nature.

Audio introduction to the AR (artistic research) project “Animals Are Looking At You”



Poster: ANIMALS ARE LOOKING AT YOU


Examples: Animals Are Looking At You – Photo Gallery




    

  1. 

    „Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind / wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt / als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.“ Rilke, R. M. (1955-1966). Duniser Elegien. Die achte Elegie. In ders., Sämtliche Werke, Band 1–6, Bd. 1, Wiesbaden und Frankfurt a. M.; S. 714-717.
    

    2. 

  2. Derrida, J. (2002). The animal that therefore I am. Transl. by D. Willis. Critical Inquiry, 28, 369-418; p 397.
    3. 


	


	

		Tagged , , ,