Title: animal transcendence

year: 2022

ANIMAL TRANSCENDENCE is a mixed media installation that consists of a LED tube that takes up the stylized form of an enlightened leash for dog, and a superposed beamer that projects an interview with an experienced dog breeder over the leash. I wanted to ear and record without prejudices as in a relation between profane disciple and acknowledged master. I wanted to be initiated as a profane to the art of the dog-bond and its “contact zone”. I wanted also to experience how to train and carry a dog with a leash in a dog-show competition. How to synchronise myself with the dog, to be “more than one and less than two” has Haraway says. The outcome of my research in the field-residency has been this "etheric" leash of lights, a virtual icon of transcendent discipline, a tool that mystically joins human and animal into a coupled rhythm when they enter into a deep natured divine bond; a convergent synchronicity as Jung was used to say. My interest is focused on the bond that involves our senses but also transcend them. I try to decipher a hidden symbiosis that is part of an inherited ancient need that comes from hunters and gatherers.This bond is revealed as an inverse complementarity because in human-dog relationship the man should be the intelligent one and the dog (as an animal) the instinctive one. Actually, what it seems to happen is that in the mixture of these two, the soul of them collaborates for a common transcendence; the animal becomes able to transmit subliminal feelings; it arouses inner reactions in man, making him or her discover in that animal (the dog) a complex, profound nature, which brings him back to the essence of life itself. The dog is a medium of contact with the material animism of the living “thing”.