© Catarina Vieira
This lecture-installation documents a site-specific research about the traces of exhibiting humans, at Artis, the Zoo of Amsterdam. The installation is composed of a video, a soundscape and two insectariums. The soundscape is a fictional psychic landscape that was created as a virtual sound walk in the zoo.
Zoos were created for scientific purposes of studying new species brought from colonised countries, but they were also fetishist places to display and stage the wild and the exotic to the western masses. Along with the colonial exhibitions, they were instruments of propaganda to justify and support colonialism.
This project, inspired by the text Simians, Cyborgs and Women, by Donna Haraway, makes visible the process of objectifying human and non-human bodies and the replacement of ones by the others as a result of relations of power within a patriarchal capitalist colonial system. The architecture as the silent witness of the past. The production of knowledge embedded on its walls, on the display systems, on the animals’ bodies, on the landscape.
Presented at DAS-Graduate School (Amsterdam), November 2016.
Created and filmed by: Catarina Vieira
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Natura Artis Magistra
This lecture-installation documents a site-specific research about the traces of exhibiting humans, at Artis, the Zoo of Amsterdam. The installation is composed of a video, a soundscape and two insectariums. The soundscape is a fictional psychic landscape that was created as a virtual sound walk in the zoo.
Zoos were created for scientific purposes of studying new species brought from colonised countries, but they were also fetishist places to display and stage the wild and the exotic to the western masses. Along with the colonial exhibitions, they were instruments of propaganda to justify and support colonialism.
This project, inspired by the text Simians, Cyborgs and Women, by Donna Haraway, makes visible the process of objectifying human and non-human bodies and the replacement of ones by the others as a result of relations of power within a patriarchal capitalist colonial system. The architecture as the silent witness of the past. The production of knowledge embedded on its walls, on the display systems, on the animals’ bodies, on the landscape.
Presented at DAS-Graduate School (Amsterdam), November 2016.
Created and filmed by: Catarina Vieira
© Catarina Vieira
© Catarina Vieira
© Catarina Vieira
© Catarina Vieira