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International Fauna

International Fauna was commissioned by arts organisation Relational through Arts Council England funding, in partnership with Picture This, Bristol and Animate Projects, London. Leading contemporary artists recognised for their sustained investigation into the dynamics of international and global economies were approached to make short moving image works in advance of the Olympics, exploring ways in which ‘bodies’ are corroborated into the aesthetics of international power relations.

In International Fauna a parade of the menagerie of animal symbols designated by nation states quick changing through a background of digital colour fields. These symbols ‘presented a synthesis of the totemic symbols that preceded them, for they combined the popularism of tribal totems with the elitism of ancient and medieval emblems…’. Michael Taussig’s ‘The Magic Of The State’ traces the contemporary nation state through it’s foundation in mystical belief and ritual. It exercises its power base drawing on a residual investment in the magical, and the transformations between spirit and matter. International Fauna brings these residual totemic traces of the nation state into view: blasted onto the screen with the energy of a viral video. The soundtrack acts as a klaxon – a blast and an anti-anthem. In the context of the public screens the sculpted, hand-drawn and painted animals were boosted into a technicolour digital hyperspace as a teaser to the televised digital logocentrics of the forthcoming games. They also perform a theatre of the absurd, a cabaret melancholique as disjointed bodies are rejoined with their digitised animal calls, as Frank Zappa sang on Absolutely Free (1968): ‘On, up & away & afar & a go-go / Escape from the weight of your corporate logo!

The work has screened in the BBC town square screen in Bristol, in galleries internationally and is published by animate projects online.