Overcoming cages overcoming bodies

The concept of mobilization as the direct action of recognizing moving beings, it could be taken from the anti-speciesist praxis and theory considered as a remedy of reclusion systems in which bodies, animals and humans are isolated into intensive structures.
As the activists Marco Reggio and Niccolò Bertuzzi say in the book Smontare la gabbia. Anticapitalismo e movimento di liberazione animale (Destroying the cage. Anticapitalism and movement of animal liberation)[1] it is essential “to dismantle mechanisms and assumptions which give birth to cages which imprison millions of animals, but also a wider range of humans: ex-colonized, women, disabled people, migrants, people excluded by the cis-gender binarism, just to mention a few.”
When animals break into the space of domination of the human race, they deal with its totaling techniques and its isolation tools, developing and proposing new emergency actions to deconstruct the system. An interesting aspect of both feminist and antiracist history is the concept of intersectionality that rethinks of someone’s identity as an inextricable element combined with various social and contingent factors. The most common conceptualizations of oppression – as, for example, racism, sexism, homophobia – they don’t act independently but in an interconnected way, creating a system that underlines the intersection of different forms of discrimination. Through a real “intersectional” approach it will be possible to dismantle the cages created by social and capitalistic hierarchies.
The reflections on animality, not by chance, arrive to observe the human-animal because – as Reggio and Bertuzzi explain – the marginalization and normalization mechanisms of violence against the weak touch the issues of animalization of migrants, women, of non-heterosexual subjects and so on. Among them, the categories of queer thinking play an important role beneath the critic against binarism and de-colonial thought, in which the “subordinate” – not necessarily human – stand as an open breach of univocal thinking and coercion systems.

Marianna Simnett - The Udder, 2014. Video still. Courtesy of the artist and Jerwood - FVU Awards

In Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times, professor Nicole Shukin underlines how the work obtained by technologically imprisoned bodies and non-human animals is linked to the circulation of animals as a form of capital. They were and still are fundamental subjects for capitalism development, not only as tools and goods for propriety accumulation but also because they represent a primary source of the workforce. Today, animals assisted by the use of totaling technologies, are workers exploited both for their productive engagement and for reproduction, in which is traces, for females, a commercial surplus-value which, in the case of milk, is extorted from the natural cycle. At the time when animals are compared to workers, we get into a renovated perspective that introduces the concept of “agentivity”, an intrinsic resilience that starts from the animal side to counteract the extensive models of caging. Animals, as agents subjects, they make themselves visible and active, by antagonizing the primary aim of capitalism of conveying them as mere farming simulacra. The so-called “ethical companies”, for example, offer a model of nature extremely artificial, packing the traditional farm as a picturesque model helped by the medial excitement of innovative techniques.
For “dismantle the gates” it is needed to overcome the one-way sphere of individual and cut off the route which goes from human to animal, to let the movement arrive at the bodies.
It is essential to adopt the perspective of “crack”, as Donna Haraway defines in A Cyborg Manifesto (1995), according to which animals are not transparent but provided with a specific density that resists to human manipulations. Antispecism is opposed to capitalistic rhetorics that need unmoving bodies by standing as a non-chemical “policy of alliances”. It supports an entanglement of relations and a social reorganization that won’t exploit any kind of life form anymore but accepts differences. The ultimate goal is not to find new imaginative constructions of animals, but activate new practices so that humans and non-humans are connected to make keen together.

Marianna Simnett - The Udder, 2014. Video still. Courtesy of the artist and Jerwood - FVU Awards

The concept of body, both human and not, is often analyzed in contemporary art as a study tool and political message, and allows to build fractured narrations that reposition the animal-individual into a symbolic scenario.
In this sense, the aesthetical research of the artist Marianna Simnett is inserted, which, influenced by the artistic “second wave” of feminism, offers with her work to locate the body and the self in the center of the contemporary debates. Combining the mythical structure of fairytales in a documentary form, the artist creates true and proper films that talk about non-linear stories od a physical terror in which contamination, illness and violence are combined with the issues of sexuality, identity and metamorphosis. In Across The Udder (2014), Blood (2015) and Blue Roses (2015), for example, the body – fragmented in digestive ways, nasal passages and circulatory pathways – gives a scenario for a series of narration now creepy now melancholic interpreted by a heterogeneous team composed of children, cyber cockroaches and sworn virgins. In every video we are directly carried into a biological, human or animal system menaced by infections or any kind of disturbs. The inside and the outside of a body are so alternated developing narration that shows scenarios between organic interior and mechanical inside.
The paradoxical playfulness of visually horrifying elements fades the gory bringing the viewer inside an ecstatic and bizarre fable. The morally gloomy stories and the grotesque sci-fi vibration are moreover dramatized by groups of non-actors (children, farmers, doctors) that confuse what is real from what is imaginary and vice-versa by filtering the fiction of the motion picture.
At the center of these visions in which bodies becoming different from themselves, problematic socio-political issues emerge that call into question the concepts of vulnerability, autonomy and control. Beneath madness and the bizarre contrasts of her schizophrenic methods, Marianna Simnett makes the spectrum of the cyborg statement real, according to which “we all are a chimera, theorized and manufactured hybrids of machine and organism”. The contested space of nature – metaphorically accompanied by the one of the feminine virtue – is now menaced, now recomposed according to a perspective which allows overcoming the individual though revealing subaltern realities opposed to the technical-capitalistic domain.
In some of her works, the artist underwent a real physical-clinical coercion, such as in The Needle and The Larynx (2016) where she accepts to modify and lower the tone of her voice through a surgical procedure to her vocal cords. The body shows itself to the public in its innate fragility and the state of empathy which follows is intrinsic to the work as well as the horror it activates. Whereas the control of death shows a passive and entire body, Simnett evokes a fragmented and alien one that, leveling off every specist hierarchy and activating contrasting and visceral emotions, can “dismantle socio-political the gates” of a titanic and apocalyptic present. The bodies in metamorphosis thus create the modalities to state the transitions as constitutive of every subjectivity and not only the non-compliant ones.

Marianna Simnett - The Needle and the Larynx, 2016, single channel HD video with surround sound. Courtesy the artist and Seventeen Gallery.

[1] In the article Quando brucia il tetto di una cattedrale (When a cathedral’s rooftop burns) pulished in «Not – NERO magazine» on April 30th 2019) Federica Timeto analyzes, in the section Gabbie (Gates), the animal issue and the antispecist theory starting from Marco Reggio and Nicolò Bertuzzi essays.

Bibliography

Donna J. Haraway, Chtulucene, Roma, NERO, 2019.

Donna J. Haraway, Manifesto cyborg, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1995.

Marco Reggio, Niccolò Bertuzzi, Smontare la gabbia. Anticapitalismo e movimento di liberazione animale, Milano, Mimesis, 2019.

Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Federica Timeto, Quando brucia il tetto di una cattedrale, in «Not», 30 aprile 2019.