There Must Be a Way Out of This Disaster

Do you like cat videos? Try watching a thousand in a row, spread them on a timeline, and map out the similarities and differences between them. This experiment could serve as a primer for the work of two-person art collective NEOZOON, whose preoccupation is human-animal relationality. Using only found footage and social media archives, the duo aims to expose the oppressive power structures that position humans as exceptional, and non-human animals as anything but.

Collage is the preferred artistic tool and method. Ever since Fur Coat Recycling (2009-2012), where they cut pelt into animal shapes and glued it to facades in many European cities, NEOZOON’s interventionist approach aims to switch contexts. “To take something out of one context and bring it into a new one,” says Michaela, one of the two members. While their early street art used cut-out techniques to, in a way, inscribe non-human animals into the urban geography (Bah Bah Black Sheep, Le Goût des Bêtes), the prominence of social media archives in their current work speaks to a new kind of cohabitation of species. What academics term ‘human-animal geography’ relates to their spatial entanglements, but the digital geographies proposed by NEOZOON are no less illuminating. “If there is a change concerning animals in the digital age, that would be a new kind of visibility. In turn, humans have started to think about pain and patterns of power in a new way,” says Friederike.

There’s a misconception that all activist art wags a finger at the viewer and in some way disciplines them into ‘being better’, but NEOZOON’s works absorb—or should we say, recycle—some of their source material’s entertainment value. Their found-footage videos highlight the absurdity and harm inherent in normalised overconsumption and are, according to Michaela, the collective’s “way of dealing with the strange behaviours we see in our society, to uncover something [for others] by shifting the context and pointing out what doesn’t work.” If there is a pedagogical element to their art, it is not in any way didactic. NEOZOON serves its critique with uncompromising sharpness, honesty, and humour, admitting to using humour as an invitation and “a way to open doors, instead of closing them, before people have the chance to think about what they just saw.” Testament to this is the collective’s bold use of music to match the rhythmic editing, splicing together the clips in every film. Percussions often feature in the lively, playful scores without overpowering the original audio track for maximum authenticity and minimum (but meaningful) intervention.

The duo works exclusively with found footage, an ecological decision that saves them and the planet’s resources, but gleaning material from every corner of the Internet sounds like an always incomplete mission. It’s no surprise, then, to hear Friederike admit that “it all happens in the editing,” while acknowledging that entails a lot of trial and error to find the perfect fit for each film. When asked whether a specific kind of discipline allows them to view the more disturbing images one can encounter online in a more detached manner, they both stress the importance of the process and what their films are conveying. “In my mind, I’m thinking about what I can do with this image, not how disturbing it is,” adds Friederike, “and there are things that one of us can’t watch while the other can, but if we spot animal cruelty, we flag it immediately.”

Humans are, according to NEOZOON, the most aggressive animal out there, exemplified by their cut-out public installation Big Game Hunter (2011), which taped true-to-size print-out images of hunters and their animal prey as trophies on the streets of Paris. Throughout their artistic career, the collective frames humans as an integral part of a structure of oppression: capitalism enslaves people, and people subjugate animals—as pets, meat, leather, byproducts. One solution—and one readily taken up by so-called abolitionists—would be to just erase the human perspective out of disdain for the pain humankind has already caused both animals and the planet as a whole. Yet, NEOZOON continuously chooses to interrogate that role instead of disregarding it. Is there a hint of optimism there, a hope that resonates through the critique? Perhaps.

“I don't know if we can make it, but we are trying! The stories we’ve shared for so long have been about the bad history of mankind. So there must be some way out of this disaster. Maybe.”