Animalia

In what’s known as a “zoonotic leap,” the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped from live mammals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China to infect shoppers, who went on to infect more than half a billion people worldwide, along with an unknown number of non-human animals. This quiet but consequential sequence of events has forever ruptured my meager consideration and understanding of the spaces in which animals and humans interface. Over the past couple years, as the world has been turned inside-out, I’ve come to think more deeply about my accidental animal encounters—these glimpses I’ve had across the narrow but inviolable divide between me and them, and about how the animals might sense my lumbering, upright form staring back at them through the looking glass. This project is my exploration of the uncanny terrain of the biological kingdom Animalia. Not just the literal, physical terrain of the taxa we share with our fellow animals, but the imaginative and symbolic terrain, as well. We depend on them for physical survival, of course, but also for spiritual guidance and as the proving ground for our moral and intellectual superiority. They are variously our companions, symbionts, pests, disease vectors, laborers, research subjects, totems, subjugates and sources of food. In seeking out the boundaries of our interweaving—if sometimes disquieting—relationships with our fellow animals, I hope to discover something poignant about the forces that bind our fates one to the other.

Who are we? Animals, for sure. Certainly evolved, different, bipedal, naked apes, writes zoologist Desmond Morris. But above all, we are a species that imagines itself above other forms of being. It's a sort of supremacy. A mental construct in reality, entirely human, as planetary diplomatic immunity that guarantees the possibility of disposing of what surrounds us. Life is equivalent to raw material—a delusional vision of the world as a reservoir at our disposal. If we look at a tree, we see wooden beams, kitchen furniture, fuel for the fireplace, and so on. If we look at animals, we see nourishment in most cases. Edible food or, more generally, we see something else from us. Something that we can kill, catalog, observe, fence, arrange, modify, and so on.

In the "Animalia" series, Barron Bixler discusses this observation point that places us on a higher plane. These photographs invite us to measure ourselves with this "distance," with what separates us or binds us to life. Many questions follow. Where is the limit of our actions? To what risks are we exposing ourselves through our voracious transformation of the environment? Bixler reminds us of Corona Virus or better, I would say, that not all our DNA is human, strictly speaking. It is estimated that a part of the human genome is made up of DNA sequences of viral origin: remnants of viral genomes integrated during our evolutionary history. Another good question is: what can we learn from animals about who we are? Are we sure that we already know everything about ourselves? In our eagerness to translate the world into language, we have deluded ourselves into thinking we can control and dominate. What words escape our vocabulary? I recently saw a documentary in which a family of hippos licked their deceased while keeping strangers at a distance. But didn't we say we were the only animal species with the clue of death? It may be convenient to think of ourselves as unique, with a soul, so as not to feel guilty about our misdeeds.