Essays, articles and talks in the Museum’s program and publications

“To break my silence, or what you take as silence, I must enter your language and domesticate you, like the cow whisperer tames a wild bull by talking to him with words he knows. So I borrow your words and carve myself into them, make a hole through them the shape of a cow. You might not see me, but you’ll see my absence. This is where my story begins.”

“Embodied empathy invites intersubjectivity with non-human animals, a state in which they are perceived as subjects, as a “you”, and which exposes one’s mind to their different way of being. It also opens one up to the expressive, embodied unity of other animals, to their way of communicating, and to their animal language.”

“Now, even our questions are obscured by hooves kicking up golden dust at dusk. Godhuli vela, they call it, the hour of cow dust, that magical time when cows returning from a day’s grazing kick the earth upward to catch the sun. The clink and nuzzle of brass bells, measured rhythm of hooves, the undulation of gleaming horns, the deep rumble of breath, large bodies against each other, warm, live, moving.”

“Even if a museum primarily displays the past and things that are over and done with, its staff are constantly weighing up how future generations are to be told about the present, what will be preserved, and what not ‒ even if what we see in the museum is the past, the staff are anticipating the future.”

“Anthropic attitudes to prereflective body dynamics oscillate between reluctance and hatred, as if suppression of animal nature were to provide impenetrable insulation from the pitfalls of living as an animal. But zoophobia not only fails to diminish the risks of being in the world; in the long run it actually multiplies the dangers.”