A still from The Square: a tuxedoed gala, guests are seated, anticipating a scheduled performance art event. As it begins, the audience is confronted by a man, an artist (echoing artist Oleg Kulik) who has chosen to become an ape for the occasion. He prowls, he tests the limits of play. At first the audience laughs, indulgent, secure in the contract of theatre. But the performance drags, stretches; the ape starts making aggressive gestures, and ambiguity grows unsettling. The scene becomes a shivering portrayal of the unpredictability of both the artist and the ape. It’s not an allegory but staged instability. The impulse of the ape becomes inaccessible, beyond the comprehension of the audience. Anything can happen. And it does. The actor-animal transgresses the line of simulation and enters the space of violence, grabbing a guest by her hair and dragging her across the hall. What was spectacle collapses into fear and panic. The scene can be read as the human–animal paradox: we desire animals, but only as simulation, only as tame. When the performance refuses domestication, terror erupts, and it takes too long for the rest of the guests to defend. The guests anticipated a somewhat extreme performance, still confined to the safety of institutional responsibility, like watching a lion in a zoo cage.

This essay continues the trajectory of my previous one, The Cute, The Bad and The Ugly, which aimed to dissect the perceptual regimes through which non-human species are apprehended: cuteness, violence, ugliness. Here, the focus shifts from perception to mechanics: the double movement by which the human situates itself among other beings. On one side lies taming — anthropomorphisation, the projection of human traits onto animals, folding them into the family of resemblance (the cartoon lion singing Hakuna Matata, the loyal dog, Aesop’s fables). On the other side lies counter-taming — the negation of animality as the founding exclusion in defining human. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine” names this structure: humanity defines itself only by cutting itself loose from “animal life.” Even the mirrored term “non-human” repeats the trap: animals defined by subtraction from the human. But both are modes of subordination that prevent animals from being themselves in our perception.

No altitude of morals, just beings colliding on the same plane. On that plane (flat ontology), projection and negation are not opposites but the same refusal of adjacency. That relation is not ready-to-hand or present-at-hand, but out-of-hand: a mode of ‘being-with’ that escapes mastery.

Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, shows how everyday things — food, fashion, advertisements, even animals — are made to look natural when in fact they carry cultural meanings. Myth works by abstraction: it strips away the messy specificity of things so they can function as signs, ideological speech disguised as nature. Barthes notes how Aesop’s fables are “at the very start mythified… by their being fiction.” Myth, he writes, empties reality: “can one imagine the feelings of a real society of animals on finding itself transformed into a grammar example, into a predicative nature!”

Abstraction is the most invisible taming: it clears away the animal’s opacity so that it can be handled not as being, but as sign. It domesticates without seeming to, erasing the opacity of beings so they can circulate as meaning. Animals are its perfect raw material: pliable, mute, available for endless conversion into signs. They carry stories because they cannot contest them.

We have offloaded so much content onto animals that they appear less as beings than as prostheses, blank surfaces for projection. Fables, cartoons, viral clips, renders, even policy labels — all are technologies of projection. Each flattens animals into legible roles: the loyal friend, the moral oracle, the friendly neighbour — stories we already know how to read. This is counter-taming by another route: negation not by exclusion but by abstraction. Both anthropomorphisation and negation work by playing with properties: one transposes animals into us, the other pushes them away, but each filters them through traits we choose to emphasise or suppress. Abstraction sharpens this crossroads — to comprehend is already to alter. The strange stranger, as Timothy Morton reminds us, becomes more distant precisely as we get to ‘know’ it.

Because animals are imagined as “closer to nature”, never expelled from the Garden of Eden, untainted by sin, they stand as a higher moral authority than humans themselves. This is where projection acquires theological gravity. The cartoon fox or lion does not merely amuse; it preaches as a displaced oracle. Animals become secularised priests, voices of moral authority in the nursery. They tell children what is right and wrong. It is the secularised Word of God — commandments without the church. This authority is double-edged: animals preach only because we first made them our extensions, their “innocence” is already ventriloquism. Children absorb the lesson not as obedience to parents, priests, or politicians, but as if Nature itself were speaking. We project our values onto the animal, and then bow before the projection.

Here, the paradox twists. Agamben insists that “the human” is defined through the exclusion of the animal. Yet our culture repeatedly summons the animal back as arbiter of morality. This inversion is absurd and telling: the fox that is excluded as alien is reintroduced as teacher of reciprocity.

Old Tom and Jerry episodes, censored or banned for violence, still stage a gentler world than the reality of cats and mice. Bambi’s forest commands us to mourn, even though it is already a pastoral fiction where death is aestheticised. The original tale did not spare cruelty, but later versions underwent brutal harmonisation.

The encounter has been displaced into representation, the animal reduced to spectacle, its opacity flattened for consumption. On social media, torrents of kittens, puppies, exotic pets perform human gestures or are being ‘funny’. Monkeys at temples learn to “smile” to receive food from tourists, their grimace read as joy. Others “play family.” We wait for the moment the animal seems to step into its cartoon self to trigger the simulation.

Renders in landscape architecture are not neutral diagrams but stagecraft. The suspicious absence of synurbic species such as rats and raccoons is telling. They thrive on our waste, adapt on their own terms, and for that are rejected, as if adaptation itself were trespass. Synurbists strike deeper than the render as they unsettle the boundary by which, as Agamben argues, humans define themselves against the animal.

Invited species serve as our apology, redeeming us in the light of ecological care. Synurbists, by contrast, arrive uninvited, emancipated, and are cast out because their presence cannot be folded into rituals of repentance.

In the render of the paradise, synurbists appear tainted — stained by debris, too close to us, lacking the aura of ‘outside Nature’. These images do not show ecology; they show purification and what culture needs ecology to look like: safe, orderly frames. Yet even this innocence is unstable: once “untainted” species adapt to urban life, they blur the boundary and join the back-street society of synurbists — sin-urbanised, expelled from paradise. An invitation, shadowed by a threshold of exclusion.

“The animal-man and the man-animal are the two sides of a single fracture, which cannot be mended from either side” (Agamben). What occupies this fracture is not an actual being but a fantasmatic apparatus: the symptoms cover the void where the human–animal line should be. The space itself is empty, but desire cannot leave it blank; it relentlessly produces figures, projecting onto animals or ‘animalising’ humans in a repetitive drama of exclusion and inclusion. Synurbists trouble this economy because they leak across on their own, puncturing the fantasy that the line can be policed from only one side.

The fear of borders collapsing can be glimpsed also in cultural provocations. In Hybrid Family (2015–16), artist Maja Smrekar induced lactation and breastfed her dog — not as an act of anthropomorphisation, but as a refusal of it, staging motherhood as solidarity across species rather than reproduction within them. The scandal the piece provoked reveals how fragile the border remains: it is not milk that shocks, but the leak of categories. Here, the fracture Agamben describes is made visible not as ontology but as political policing — the panic of a culture confronted with adjacency out-of-hand. The artwork was scrutinised and weaponised by the Slovenian right-wing party, SDS, for their wider political campaigns against artists, using Nazi vocabulary like ‘degenerate’ art.

Perhaps the only thing that separates us from animals is our drive to imagine that such a line must exist. And in that imagining, the line becomes real — not as truth, but as rule. And so the search for an ontological border masks a different labour: the perpetual projection of political ones, to keep categories in place. The fracture functions less as a metaphysical mystery than as a site of discipline, a policing of leaks.

Violence, when it cannot be denied, is displaced. Hunters who pause to thank the deer, the cinematic gesture in Avatar where Neytiri whispers gratitude to Eywa after the kill — these are not refusals of violence but its obscene supplements. Ideology works precisely here: by staging a ritual apology that allows the violence to continue untroubled. To thank the animal is to kill with a good conscience, where the victim is supposed to accept its fate within some wider ethical sublime.

Interview with Marcus Coates in which he talks about his relationship to birdsong, the digital processes behind Dawn Chorus and the relationship between the work and the space at Fabrica Gallery.

Landscape architecture stages its own ethical gloss through renders and schemes of biodiversity. Arranging species into convivial tableaux is the low-hanging fruit of ecological representation. The other pole, harder but necessary, is to stage adjacency without assurance: room for teeth, for decay, for what doesn’t harmonise. Design doesn’t have to resolve this gradient, but can hold itself closer to its jagged side. Green labels, “nature-based solutions”: catalogues of pre-fabricated and bundled fragments of care ready to be deployed, IKEA ecologies, and artsy insect hotels. What is offered is a commodified and consumable promise of innocence where violence persists; land cleared, histories erased, hierarchies enforced — but over it spreads a green rug of ecological care, a ritual gesture, almost a flag with a shading function.

The rhetoric of “community of species” extends the same operation. Ecosystems are framed as neighbourly collectives, pastoral friendships, but interspecies life is predation, parasitism, avoidance — a community of teeth and imbalance. Rendered habitats mask the vigilance with which beings inhabit the world: a constant scan for threats, for prey, for escape.

The render of biodiversity is no less ideological than the storybook animal. Both are mechanisms of tame: one for pedagogy, the other for design. They conjure fictions of harmony where there is predation, reciprocity where there is competition, and conviviality where there is vigilance. These images do not show ecology; they show our need for it to appear tame, available and safe. To harmonise is to colonise. To design “communities of species” is a delicate matter, often resulting in overwriting teeth with smiles, translating constant alarm into the false calm of colour-sorted diagrams. Conversely, documentaries about the “outside Nature” often overcompensate — saturating screens with teeth and blood, animals turned into assassins ranked by brutality.

Timothy Morton names the irreducible opacity of beings strange strangers. The phrase itself performs a paradox: to name estrangement is already to familiarise it, to turn strangeness into a category. And yet, once named, it opens another perception: I see a frog and not just a frog, but something obscure — as if held in a low-res state. The term collapses and expands at once — taming estrangement into language while multiplying its directions through imagination. It is a dialectic the animal neither asks for nor resolves; it is our human labour to sustain it without closure. So while observing the frog, one might ask not how it is known, but how it is unknown.

In an interview for Lousiana Channel, Pierre Huyghe states: “I’m interested in contingency. Of what is not predictable. Of what is unknown. I think that has somehow been a core of the work. (…) I’m not here to address or to explain. To give answers,” (…) “I would say it’s about perplexity. If there are enough playful and thoughtful ideas taking a sensitive form, I think that is what an artist is doing.”

This opens perception, pushes imagination into uncharted territories, and in a way resets the encounter. Yet estrangement never holds; it slides back into comprehension, into taming. That fragility is its strength, not its failure — it demands renewal, a vigilance against closure. This inversion makes estrangement fruitful, even as it acknowledges its own limits. Estrangement radicalises what Heidegger calls the present-at-hand: the frog, the ape, the forest suddenly stand forth, opaque, uncanny, unknown. But adjacency asks for another register still: not ready-to-hand, not present-at-hand, but out-of-hand — a being-with that may be slipping into disorder, a relation that neither domestication nor estrangement can exhaust.

The estrangement in The Square is double: unpredictability displaced from animal onto human. In performance, the actor becomes non-human, not by mimicry but by stripping himself of recognisable boundaries. There was ambiguity in what an ape could do and what an artist could do. He is, in fact, mimicking an ape, but far transcending the social boundaries of an art performance.

The anthropological machine and the cartoon machine are not two devices but settings of the same apparatus. No principle redeems this. What remains is practice: to decolonise projection, to refuse animal preachers, to drop the community myth when it erases risk, and to design with restraint, leaving room for decay, carrion, pests, the unrelatable and uncanny.

Projection and negation are twin erasures. They keep us circling, refusing adjacency. No reconciliation — only the persistence of paradox, and the demand that design not soothe it, but leave it out-of-hand.

Anything can happen. And it does.