‘Animal Mirror’ is a contemporary art project curated by Jesus Alcaide, bringing together the work of Eduardo Hurtado and Pablo Capitan del Rio in a dialogue through performance, drawing and sculpture around Animality.
Animal as a metaphor. Animal as a state. Animal as an idea. Animal as an image. Animal as a body. Animal as being. Animal mirror.
Recently in areas ranging from philosophy to anthropology through linguistics, history and literary studies, many agents have been responsible for configuring an animal turn that redefines and reorders the flow of thought in around animality.
This enquiry “questions on the one hand the existence of a single and immobile dividing line between the territory of the human and the animal; and, on the other hand, of the idea of symmetry between both terms; two issues intimately linked to each other and crucial for the construction of a metaphorical relationship”(Yelin, Julieta, The Animal Turn, 2011).
Beyond the differentiation of notions about the human and the animal, this turn focuses on those notions that put them in contact. That is to say, symbologies that allow us to think of ourselves as two sides of the same coin; a reflection in the mirror. Animal nitrate in mind.
‘The Behavior of Animals’ (2017) © Eduardo Hurtado
As Jacques Derrida pointed out in “The Animal That Therefore I Am“, it is not about ignoring or erasing everything that separates men from other animals and reconstructing a single large group (a large homogenous and continuous family tree), but to take into account a multiplicity of boundaries and heterogeneous structures.
The works of Pablo Capitán del Río and Eduardo Hurtado, address this issue of animality, from ethology and metaphor, symbol and writing, extending these limits to generate new effects that help us to reconstruct those figurations of an animal interiority.
From performative scripts developed from “The Behavior of Animals” (2017) by Eduardo Hurtado, to the “Traps of equilibrium” (2017) by Pablo Capitán del Río, we witness the staging of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as becoming/animal, a discontinuous play of thresholds and vibrations, a circuit of states that form a mutual evolution.
“There is no longer any man or animal, since each de-territorializes the other, in a conjunction of flows, in a continuum of reversible intensities”; an animal mirror.
ANIMAL MIRROR Eduardo Hurtado & Pablo Capitan del Rio at SCAN Project Room (13-19 Herald St., London, E2 6JT)
Curated by Jesus Alcaide
From 29th of Novembre to 23rd of December 2017.
Cover image © Pablo Capitan del Rio. ‘Equilibrium traps’ (2017). Cardboard, iron, wood 48 x 18 x 6 cm, 56 x 23 x 8 cm, 75 x 25 x 21 cm,117 x 67 x 40 cm, 175 x 98 x 63 cm.
