For the seventh consecutive Festival Champs/Contre-champs, the Centre d’art GwinZegal in Guingamp invites visitors to continue exploring representations of the countryside through a selection of photographic and video works from the collections of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques.
Why look at animals? — in a series of essays, stories, and poems, John Berger evokes the long history of the relationship between human and non-human animals, reminding us of the extent to which, at a time of extinction, the destiny of animals is tied up with human activity and suffers the consequences of the transformation of the world due to the systematic exploitation of its resources. This history is not only bound up with the culture of capitalism, but is also intertwined with mythologies and feelings, with the animal placed by humanity in the position of radical otherness. Before they were objectified as raw materials for food and other productive purposes, animals were endowed with magical properties. Because they are both so close to and so unlike humans, people chose to forget what they have in common and what has brought them together in mutual dependence.
Because communication between humans and non-humans does not rely on spoken language, the exchange of glances becomes the site of their absolute inequality. Jacques Derrida opened his wonderful book, The Animal That Therefore I Am, with a vertiginous philosophical examination of the gaze aimed at us by animals, suggesting we should rethink the animality of human beings.
While the zoo has become the site that foregrounds this irremediable loss of connections between the two forms of animality, human and non-human, as well as preserves specimens of endangered or extinct species of so-called wild-life (in other words, a museum of forms of non-human life), the farm is where the proximity between them has survived.
Through a collection of photographic, video, and sound works by such artists as Malick Sidibé, Eric Poitevin, Marie-Noëlle Boutin, and Jef Geys, this exhibition reflects on the topical issue of animal representation. Besides animal portraits that focus on the animals’ singularity rather than classifying them as representative samples of a typology, what other artistic approaches are being developed?
The reasons for looking at animals are more evident than ever — there is a clear need for this gaze — but the question remains, how should they be represented? How to formulate anew, in the present-day world which we inhabit together, the conditions of this relationship? One of the paths explored by artists is to retrace the narratives of singular stories, to resuscitate forgotten traditions, to give the animal an identity in order to reveal the sensible dimension of our coexistence.
Pascal Beausse
Pascal Beausse curates the photography collection at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Guingamp.
Champs/Contre-Champs: Vivre avec les bêtes
March 31 to May 27, 2018
Espace François-Mitterrand
1, place du Champ-au-Roy
22200 Guingamp
France
