Equality

I believe in the strength of the human being, as in the same way I believe in the strength of the animal. Both influence what is around them and have an impact on the context in which they live. Both are weak, strong, free, captive, alive or dead. Both see, hear and behave causing an effect on the environment and its inhabitants. Although these values of equality unite them, they are and remain creatures of two worlds: one for the wild, the other for the urban space. Being different but the same humans and animals keep protecting their own peers from who present a danger to survival. Depending on the territory in which they meet, the laws of the two kingdoms confront and it happens a moment of share. I ask myself, which of the original values remain the same and which change? Where does equality exist? Which value comes to be shared and how much does it matter if, at a certain point, it can simply vanish?

Coexistence

The meeting is a moment in which two protagonists show behaviors of spontaneous tension and, depending on the context, have more or less freedom to manifest themselves. The nature of human - animal encounters varies: Spontaneous and unexpected ones follow forced and sought others. Human actions based on empathy and respect follow ones of greed, where egoism, suppression and other roles of power come in. Looking at each other, listening to each other, smelling each other or fearing each other becomes, so, an exchange of information of two natures and this is the birth of a relationship. The concept of coexistence is the mutual adaptation and endurance which allows two individuals to maintain a balanced relationship of closeness. I wonder, is it possible to perceive or see coexistence between a person and an animal?  If so, where?

To domesticate

Wild and domestic are contradictory features that belong to the realms of the unexpected and expected. By walking in a forest, navigating a sea, climbing a mountain or entering a house, humans are very often in extreme proximity to animals but, what happens when this context change? It changes the nature of the place and the nature of its inhabitants. With the urgency to feel safe from the unknown humans have, in various ways, to get close to animals, to predict and control them and to act on their freedom of being. The result is to save what you are damning and to commit a basic mistake: to domesticate the nature of someone. What can domestication teach to the one who does it? Can I know about your original nature or should nature already be original?

The role

The sudden encounter of a passerby in the jungle makes the tiger reactive and defensive but the same case in the zoo leaves it calm and firm. The element on which this depends is the role, that is the function that something acquires in a given context. The role resonates like an echo, it conveys something invisible but totally decisive and it transforms the individual who plays it, into a specific individual who acts in a certain way and within a limited space. Being a person and being an animal means being alive but it also means to become an actor in a game of (in)equality that keep changing its balance. I wonder, if the context changes, and with it the individual defense tools, of which roles does the human being who encounters a wild rather than a domestic animal dress and undress?

Intimacy

Some years ago I photographed inside a farm for about two months. The result has been the observation of a context by starting from the animal’s point of view. I photographed the infrastructures, the chicken coop, the stables, the cages, then I turned to their inhabitants, the chickens, the roosters, the cows, the horses and the goats. I observed their movements, how they interacted among themselves and if they would have ever looked at me. This allowed me to change the focus on the people, I so photographed when the farmers milked the cows, fed the calves, cleaned the horses or entered the chicken coop. By asking myself if there could ever be an intimacy between those inhabitants, I understood about my curiosity for the image of intimacy and mutual endurance, among them. I kept wondering where I could have visualized it and I looked for it in whatever corner.

Animality

The animal structures my awareness and voice in relation to my position as a person in society, it makes me better realize about what it means to be the human being that I am, every day and almost every moment. However the animal is also what I contain within my body, that is, a being instinctive, visceral, irrational or bestial at the expense of social conventions. This is another chapter to be opened but, for now, I leave it closed. I just say that I would call it animality and that I would look for it everywhere, except in animals.

____

I WANT THE ABOLITION OF THE SUPERIOR EYE

no need to fear,
no need to guess,
no need to doubt.
on how to look

no trampling gazes,
no first attempts,
no need for help.
on how to look

non-comprehension,
non-convention,
non-intention.
on how to look

head up,
to open,
the closed.
on how to look

warm up,
to welcome,
the opposed.
on how to look

shut up,
to hear,
the exposed.
on how to look

no time,
no movement,
no influence.
on how to look

no me,
no self,
no I.
on how to look

one and two,
two and one,
united units.
on how to look

____

Roles of power start from below but the rule lays within

We were peering at each other silently and impassively, yet with an extreme doubt about the respective experience that was bringing us together. You wouldn’t imagine it like that. A moment so alive and intimate to become, somehow, even annoying. The contradiction of this solitary moment for two was a real, important, matter. It was giving to each of us the right space to exist and express our own nature with the consequence to feel equal in our own independent lives. ‘How can you have all these people around and just keep on doing your job?’, with this question in mind for the innocence of what I was looking at, I held myself stuck in that present moment for more than ten minutes and, I admit, it has been revelatory:

I was sitting on a wooden chair with the right hand leaning down the table in a comfortable position of rest. I was there without movements, intentions, or expectation, of what it might have happened after. Looking outside I was resting from work, from people talking and from the city running. It was about a sense of detachment from the oppression of being sunk into what is the mind, the thought, the daily expectation and whatsoever. I was simply taking a break from everything else except what I was looking at: the neutral view outside the window of my kitchen. Suddenly, without any notice, he jumped into the scene occupying the whole range of space and leaving me with additional material to observe. His calmness and elegance were functioning as a sedative and I couldn’t do anything more then keep on looking at its movements reaching no fixed destination. The only matter which was dividing us was a thin layer of glass and throughout it a whole stream of connections was arising, in colors and shapes. Grey hair, a long tale and quick unexpected jumps added elements to the visual composition in which no specific sound was playing.

Unfortunately that moment of close detachment could have never brought us to a good chat and, even if possible, this is not the point of the matter. We were two strangers connected by rules bigger than us, rules which have always existed and lived upon us, every day of our lives. Society, as we all know it, has the duty and the power to establish the more and the better rules for a good life condition - a.k.a social conventions 1. In other words, no instructions on how to play and you can’t play anymore or, alternative option, you might better enjoy the game alone and without rules. In the moment of looking outside the window seconds became minutes because something unexpected happened. The view was still the same, the glass was still there, the sound was not playing, yet something apparently insignificant had an extreme power of takeover for which the rules bigger than us shifted away and left us in a game without instructions: He looked back. He looked back to me. He did this few times by turning his head, freezing in a position and staring at my eyes. He looked back and there I felt incredibly captured, seen, discovered and recognized. “What were the secrets of the animal’s likeness with, and unlikeness from, man? The secrets whose existence man recognized as soon as he intercepted an animal’s look” 2. What was flowing in my veins was a mixture of doubt and surprise and I felt naked of something which I was not ready to be in control of: the awareness of being alive and unknown as much as the animal was to me.

What society teaches us is when to expect something and when not to expect it. Human beings, as little puppets, are drove to become ready for situations to happen and to already know and -think, before events to concretize. In order to survive we brought these assumptions into our daily behavioral system that, as a consequence, bring us forward in the hierarchical power escalation for which we are seen as the dominant species on all. Dogs bite, so we train them how to stop doing it. Birds fly and we can easily reach them in the sky. Elephants are majestic creatures and we worship their welfare by building up fences that safeguard their extinction. We know, we know, we know, we know, we know and we always tend to know. All this, and all the rest, ends up categorizing humans into one unique stream of happenings called the time of the Anthropocene. Within this melting pot of actions and position taking we, somehow, recognize the problems of our machinery mind and so we still seek for a connection with what we rule and domesticate: nature. I ask here, did we really try our best to make this connection truly and healthy happen?

What that insignificant moment of eye-contact with a cat taught me is that the laws under which people and animals are constantly ruled can be temporarily overturned in order to allow our brain to open up to new ways of thinking about Life. To negotiate these rules might seem difficult but it is not if we take into account that the first position-taking happens in the moment of looking at the other: the animal as the observer, not the observed, the person as the other from the animal, not the animal as the other from the person. What can I learn from all this if I begin to perceive animals with an equal right to be as I have? The roles of power start from below, right there in the moment of looking at someone and the freedom of how to rule it, comes neither from law nor from money but from your own intention. By meeting his gaze in a dimension of total equality, the cat in front of my window became a peer and a subject to rethink about my fears and weaknesses, simple tracts of all existing, and living, beings. This condition allowed me to feel detached from the universal rules of power structure between classes and to enrich myself of the consciousness of being free to think beyond the barriers of convention.

“I talked to dogs, listened to their secrets and kept them to myself” 3.

1. Convention: A way in which something is usually done. (Apple Dictionary)

2. Why Look at Animals?, John Berger, Penguin, 2009, p.15.

3. Why Look at Animals?, John Berger, Penguin, 2009, p.11.