The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species, have become utterly dependent upon their keepers.Consequently most of their responses have been changed. What was central to their interest has been replaced by a passive waiting for a series of abitrary outside interventions.
– John Berger, Why We Look at Animals
Teddy bears and other plush toys are sitting there, face to face, just like having a conversation, although they can never speak a word. Light cast their shadows on the wall which composed a negative image of a QUESTION MARK. Together with the phrase here, it’s a sentence
“WHO ARE WE?”
That’s the animals’ doubt about how human define them. The monitor is playing the real animals’ reality in different contexts, in contrast with the toys. And accord with the installation work, the main argument against the video clip played in the monitor is how peoplesee animals in life. – Humans are assuming animals as this or that because that’s how we perceive the animals in our everyday life, but what are the realities? Are they running in the wild? Or suffering under the cage?
‘Who Are We’ is a installation with shadow sculptures, it was created as a response for the class ‘Making Animal Studies’ I took at Edinburgh College of Art in 2017, after a semester’s research on the relationship between human and animals from a artistic perspective.
