Kuvaus
In Finland, taxidermied animals have been used for educational purposes across a variety of settings both in and outside of traditional educational settings, even taking up residence within a vast majority of school buildings over the course of several generations. However, many have come to encounter taxidermied animals through the glass display cabinets found in city’s natural history museums. As a practice, taxidermy, or the delicate reorganizing of (from the Greek “taxis”) animal skins (“derma”) became popular during the age of Enlightenment as a curiosity-driven form of preservation for the scientific observation of animals, particularly those collected from lands distant and exotic from the prevailing colonial empires of the late 18th century. As a form of sculptural artistry, taxidermy involves paying close attention through kinesthetic or sensory perception to the material traces and aesthetic atmospheres associated with the particular animal’s corpse at hand.For our Dream Team session we seek to explore the sometimes gory or macabre atmospheres surrounding taxidermy animals, and the transformative process of ‘becoming’ ghostly apparitions of one’s formerly animated self, in a playful artistic manner. In doing so, we seek to make space for conflicting affects and knowledges when interacting with forms and structures within a framework that combines scientific and artistic perspectives, particularly in how we come to understand the relationships between humans, animals, and objects. The aim is to blur the boundaries between different disciplines and encourage a more holistic understanding of these relationships. Collectively we will attempt to grasp the ‘affecting’ memories of these toy animals through activities of disassembling and re-assembling them, all the while attempting to trace, re-shape, and re-capture these affecting qualities anew.
As we are especially interested in atmospheres of childhood in the anthropocene, we see childrens’ plush toys as forming a playful yet pivotal role in forming child/animal relations, as they are a sort of peculiar version of animals, perhaps creating and enhancing anthropocentric human-other-animal relations by presenting animals often as cute and cuddly. The relationship of plush toys and taxidermied animals is interesting in terms of atmospheres as they have some aspects in common, but are still totally different. One is made to be observed as the scientific representation of a species, other made to be cuddled. Both are done by paying careful attention to the animacy and atmospheric affects of the animals. In our Dream Team we intend to engage with the peculiarities evoked through these conflicts by mutilating and reshaping these toys animals as materials.
In drawing inspiration from Anna Tsing (2015), we seek to work at the unruly edges or margins of such taxidermied assemblages. Our aim is to delve more deeply into processes underlying taxidermy in their capacities to evoke empathizing or even blur boundaries between human and non-human species through affecting atmospheres. Atmospheres comprise a diverse network of ‘affects’ that are connective, divergent, and open to change. By attending to emerging atmospheric ‘affects’ stemming from the morphology and kinesthetic activities of taxidermy, we seek to dwell at the boundaries of animate/inanimate, material/immaterial, or death and life. By applying a “both/and” approach we seek to gain deeper understanding of how to address the coexistence of life amidst the anthropocene’s ‘ruins’, while also facilitating multispecies agency in educational context.
During this session we will playfully explore how artistic practices of taxidermy are done using plush toy animals in place of actual dead animals. By using plush stuffed toy animals to perform processes mimicking those used by taxidermists, we seek to dwell on questions associated with transformative processes involving these bodies. We aim to evoke both visible and invisible materials in their agentic capacities during the ongoing transformation. We seek to explore questions regarding what unseeable material ‘others’ are present when transforming these ‘empty’ toy animal vessels? What can we learn from atmospheric elements of such transformations particularly regarding the types of educational information they embody?
Aikajakso | 9 tammik. 2025 |
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Tapahtuman otsikko | 8th European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry: Hope, Humility and Playfulness in a Precarious World |
Tapahtuman tyyppi | Konferenssi |
Konferenssinumero | 8 |
Sijainti | Edinburgh, BritanniaNäytä kartalla |
Tunnustuksen arvo | Kansainvälinen |