“Breaking an animal”, Freies Museum Project Room, Berlin, 2011.

Animal’s ability to observe us, humans, is actually important to us, and the fact that we are interested in exchanging gazes with animals is an sign to another way of thinking about animals. By no other species expect man will the animal’s look be recognised as familiar.

Video: Breaking an animal

We unite with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers. Then we become funny or tragic; we can be loved, hated, pitied and admired. For us, animals are all the strange, beautiful, pitiable, and frightening things.

With domestication (taming “wild” animals to live with humans by altering their behavior and/or physiology), our relationships with other animals had become much more diverse and complex. Like cows that are something that is hidden from most of us in our daily lives. Cows which are so anonymous and still so familiar.