Museums for Cross-Species
Empathy with non human species is a sentiment being cultivated by many contemporary eco artists whose work attempts to overcome the alienation between contemporary humans and the countless other species who share the planet with them.
But Terike Haapoja's empathetic art extends beyond cross-species identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings of non human life forms. Instead of ascribing her own emotions, needs, and attitudes to animals, Haapoja presents entire histories of these species from their own perspectives. She launcehed her new endeavor by creating the first museum for a non-human form of life. She describes it as "an institution that makes (the animals') experience of this shared reality visible."
The "Museum of the History of Cattle" opened on 1.12. 2013 in Helsinki.
This non-human ethnographic museum exhibits the history of one of humanity’s most important and ancient companion species – cattle. The large scale exhibition looks at the way the lives of this species was affected by humanity – emphasizing scientific theories like evolution, technological developments like the Industrial Revolution, and urbanization. Each of these human advances disrupted the ecosystems bovines requir to thrive. In all these ways, bovine culture is exhibited and documented beside the ideologies that impacted them. Grand concepts like time, history and heritage are also interpreted from dual cattle perspectives – those controlled by humans and cattle not subjected to normative human-domination.
The Museum is the first part from the encyclopedic research and art project, “The History of Others”, that Haapoja is developing in collaboration with author, playwright Laura Gustafsson. The press release explains that the project aims at re-writing cultural history from the point of view of non-human animals. Research for different species’ viewpoint of shared cultural development is made in collaboration with researches and professionals from different fields of biology, humanities and arts. The project takes on different forms related to the species in question, with long distance goal of collecting different parts of the research and art works as a grand-scale Museum of the History of Others exhibition and publication.