RE: Introducing Animal Geometries
The fact that you focus on things that we rarely notice or that most people do not know "how to see" until you point them out with your photos is fascinating to me.
On the past few months I have been studying a series of Latin American authors that belong to a category called "minor literature". Basically these authors can not be cathegorized because they do not really fit any labels, they are "weird". One of the things I like about them is that they write about things that the majority of authors will not write about, things that people do not notice or don't want to notice, the things they do not talk about (either because they do not ever stop to think about them or because they are taboo topics).
The reason I like this is because our perspective(s) of the world are shaped by what we see, and what we see is often shaped for us by someone/something else. In other words: we are taught to see . Seeing is not only a natural, biological and/or unconscious act, we see because we are taught what to see and how to see it.
And this can be taken into different contexts, like, in literature, we'd be talking about perceiving or identifying discourses, while in the zoo we'd be talking about perceiving textures on animals to compose a whole different image of them.
Anyway, sorry about the rambling haha I just feel that is fascinating to see the same attitude taken from a photographer's point of view. We should all train ourselves to see beyond what we usually see.
P.S: You're right, I never thought about a Grizzly Bear's toenails before! It's because when I think of a bear's footprint there isn't a toenail print... Now that they have been seen they cannot be unseen haha
Please never be sorry for relating things across media here. This is pretty much my dream comment.
I'm curious if this is a strictly realistic category, or if it relates to what we think of as speculative/slipstream/magic realism. I'm not sure how much "magic realism" is a true category in Latin American literature versus how much it was made up by Americans to describe what some authors are doing. (Borges, Marquez, Allende being the big ones.) My knowledge of how any of that works natively is pretty poor.
Yes, exactly. It's especially obvious in animals because so many of our animal archetypes are shaped by illustrated children's books. They're one of the earliest things we're taught to see.
Well I called it a category, but maybe I'd be going against the Minor Literature work essence if I do. The term was coined by Literary critics Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari to kind of describe Kafka's work in contrast to what would be a "Major Literature", which is highly influenced and shaped by literary canon. So a minor literature work would be one that inserts inself in the context of a major literature but actually comes from minority. I.e: an author from a marginalised group that writes in a major language and inserts their work in the context of a major literature that considers them as an "outsider", or basically, a part of a minority. I don't know if I explained it very well haha
I think this article could explain it better than me
So I suppose is not a strict category more than a way of understanding how literary canon works and how discourses are selected to be a part of or stay outside of that canon.
We do study "Magic Realism" as a genre or literary movement in Latin American literature studies but I wouldn't dare to deny that it's became a tag that a lot of (american and latin american)critics use to describe a lot of works and its authors that are technically pursuing something else (in terms of style, intention, use of language, etc). Personally, I place Magic Realism mostly in the XX century and I believe that we can make such differenciation between a minor and a major literature now because Literary Critique has been constantly redefining its place and mission in the current century. (Although I'm sure an author like Borges was way ahead of Deleuze on this train of thought haha he was BRILLIANT!)
Definitely! And I'd take it a step forward and mention how animals are/were represented in classic cartoons, for example, and even in modern children educational tv shows. From a pedagogyc point of view the main objective would be to teach the child how to distinguish each animal by their sillouetes, shapes, sizes, colours, etc., but viewing them as a whole.
Something arts allow you to do is exactly the opposite: view things as a whole but also from their parts, by deconstructing each part, each layer that makes up the whole and give it a sense of meaning on its own (without reducing the whole to a mere part, of course).
I may have gone overboard here haha it's an interesting topic.
I look forward to see more of your pictures!
Oh, ok. I come from science fiction, which is kind of a ghettoized subcanonical tradition that's been traditionally extremely dominated by straight white males, so we're dealing with that both as we try to break our subject matter into to the regular canon and as we try to open up our own canon to more diverse voices. It's very much dominating the literary conversation at the moment.
Yeah, so, for example, a woman who writes science fiction in the context that you just explain could have a minor literature work in the process, or a homosexual man... but of course there are other things to take into account (according to Deleuze and Guattari:
You'd think Science Fiction as a genre would be the most open to other voices precisely because of its "ghetoized condition", even from outside of regular canon it still has to break certain barriers, traditions, beliefs... I guess every little piece of literature has its own mechanisms by which it inserts inself inside or outside of canon.
Well, it has taken a fair amount of ass-kicking and name-taking, but I feel like we are making progress. The majority of awards in the field are going to traditionally-marginalized authors now. They're still lagging in sales, because the most popular authors are still the ones who market primarily to tech-obsessed young men, but the core community has become much more inclusive.
That much is true, it's taken some time but progress is visible. I am glad that the field is becoming more and more inclusive, that also keeps the genre alive, it allows it to transform and evolve.
You really pointed it out