The Second Living Being
Metamorphosis * and Report for an Academy ** are two interesting short stories by Franz Kafka, the first is the story of the transformation of humans into animals, the second is the story of the transformation of animals into humans, to which we can relate the oil painting The Big Goat or The Witches of the Sabbath by Francisco de Goya, is a metaphor of people in society.
The scholar Cary Wolfe divided the relationship between humans and animals into four categories: animalized, humanized human, humanized animal, animalized human. Such categorization existing in human consciousness is the ideology of human centrism to imagine constituting a cognitive model of "anthropological mechanism". This anthropological mechanism creates an absolute and functional difference between humanity and animality, on the one hand creating a hierarchical system between humans and animals, and on the other hand fundamentally excluding animality from the human qualities of this world, according to Heidegger.
Thus we can differentiate between "pure" animals, those with human sentience, and "complete" animals, with animality. This leads us to reflect on the value of "laboratory animals" or "commercial" animals and their place in society, which human beings tend to appropriate and treat without dignity.
By extending this theory, we realize the dangers of such a hierarchy, especially when it concerns the so-called "animalized" human beings, who are sometimes treated with indignity by other human beings, or by communities.
In the paintings of this exhibition, many animals will be studied such as bats hanging in caves, monkeys, laboratory rabbits, dragged pigs.
I first let the image of these animals in the painting conform to animalized animals, and then enhanced them into animalized people, in order to show what I see, a world of spectacle "filled with animals".
* KAFKA, Franz, Metamorphosis, Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1915
** KAFKA, Franz, Report for an academy, Der Jude, Germany, 1917 on