The title of the project is taken from one of the letters written to Felice Bauer by Franz Kafka, the centenary of whose death falls this year. With On the Ground among the Animals, Marina Caneve explores the ambiguities inherent in the dominating role played by human beings over nature and the tensions that emerge from their relationship with other animals.The artist takes her cue from an analytical study of the Natura 2000 project, the network of ecological corridors to preserve biodiversity promoted by the European Union. And so she creates a visual link between the infrastructures connecting the wild animals, the videos generated by the monitoring systems and the nature reserve landscapes. She touches on key themes such as migration and freedom of movement, non-human animal rights, ecosystem conservation and ultimately the possibility of rethinking human beings’ role in the world.
The exhibition begins with a homage to writer Vitaliano Trevisan and a triptych of images with a passage taken from his I quindicimilapassi (The 15,000 Steps), introducing the topic of the conflict between human desires and needs and the order of natural space. Alarge series of colour photographs focus on the landscape of the nature reserves, paying particular attention to the presence of animals, barriers and flow monitoring systems. In parallel, the artist starts from theoretical research to present a series of photographs responding to cultural, technical and social investigation into the topics of infrastructure, design, animals and their depiction, policies, freedom of movement and preservation of biodiversity. The visual research includes architecture built by the animals such as termite mounds. Some of the most important infrastructures in the network are the bridges which help the animals get around architectural barriers: fencing directs the paths the animals take and monitoring cameras trace their movements, calling into question their effective freedom. The bridges were photographed by Marina Caneve on the field in several EU countries:the Netherlands, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Denmark, Greece, Spain and Italy.The black-and-white images conjure up the idea of documents or a type of architecture. The installation on display, made alongside exhibition design studio Etaoin Shrdlu, brings to mind an infrastructure to “realize cosmic order”,as inspired by Superstudio’s Continuous Monument.
Then, taking inspiration from the footage of “camera traps” set up by the researchers to document and monitor the animals on the bridges, Marina Caneve has created a three-channel video installation, whose animal and human presence suggests that we reflect on contemporary migration policies, surveillance and intrusive images. The videos are accompanied by an original sound track composed by Renato Rinaldi, inspired by Kafka’s short stories as “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, sounds from nature, and deterrence sounds to keep animals away from danger.