Animal Macula

In recent years, the animal question has come to the forefront of ethical and philosophical reflection. More broadly, it is all living things that are being questioned, particularly in terms of their capacity to be embraced and grasped by humans, whose perceptions of them are either problematic, antagonistic or dramatically fragmented. The nature-culture duality and the domination of capital in the organization of our economies have shaped a type of being that is blind to the infinite energies and variations of the Living, and have created a mortifying distrust of the natural world, and an instinct for domination and control over anything that escapes anthropocentrism.

In his torrential work Animal Macula, L'Espérance exhumes 125 years of animal representations, extracting the strange and disconcerting traces of beasts from the immense flood produced by world cinema. To plunge into it is to risk leaving anthropocentric sensibility for a moment to experience another kind of presence, somewhere between sensory meditation and extra-human vertigo. While the relationships depicted here bear witness to violence and domination, it is rather through this experimentation of another sensory order that the work disturbs and shocks. Access is gained through profoundly human cues: warm, pulsating flesh, unsettling glances, dazzling aesthetics of texture and form. But thanks to a spiral montage reminiscent of Pelechian's cinema, reason eventually gives us a respite, allowing us to enter the work bodily, with the salutary illusion of having been reconciled to that total Other, reified to excess, hated because it slumbers within us: the Animal.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director