The place where two natures meet

NB: contains reference to art depicting suicide and body mutilation.

We are not only human. Some of know that fact consciously, perhaps surprised by some tidbit science news that suggests how much of our biomass is microbes – ten-to-one, nonhuman to human, last I heard. Rarely if ever does the NONhuman scream in capital letters and strike my subconscious or, to use a less violent metaphor, lodge into my core and make itself known. That I (a human) am not fully human. A strange feat of knowing: to believe that what you believe is not altogether true. My self-referential thoughts are never quite up to the task – language breaks – what to do? 

A recent art encounter shocked me into keeping company with the nonhuman. Begin narration: you walk into a dark space and see a dappled hide on the concrete floor. Edging around piles of dead plant matter, the form sharpens and you see a human torso with a horse's body. The centaur is dead as if asleep, and her limp expression is noble. Her face is marked with white streaks; her rear is exposed for all to see. Other visitors step carefully in front of the body, looking down at her. Many take photos, pretending to be police officers at the scene of a crime. You walk away.

This is one room of the Danish Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Uffe Isolotto and collaborators also constructed two more scenes. In one, a male centaur appears to have hung himself; in the other there are many oblong glassy forms and one large leg of prosciutto. The illusion of the sculptures is so strong that it overcomes my disbelief of art and myth: they are real in the first and strongest glance.

(Isolotto's sketch of the oblong forms found in the Danish Pavilion)

There is much to discuss about the traditional-futuristic tragedy staged here in Venice. I want to elaborate on one small part of this piece. The centaur is a figure that since at least early modern times pulls us into a zone of hybridity. By this I mean being more than one. The "yes and" of improv, if it were embodied. In Dante's Inferno, the narrator encounters the centaur Chiron and notices, near his chest, "the place where his two natures met" (dove le due nature son consorti, XII, 84). The verb phrase, son consorti, implies that the parts of his body are not only united but have a shared fate (sorte, cf. Treccani "consorte"). More than a figurative use of the word, this image should insist to us that what we might see as a (perverse?) inter-species boundary at the centaur's waist is, in fact, the point of inter-fated-ness. 

Her dead body muddles the animal and human into a weakened state: look, we're dying over here. A flurry of images and feelings about kinship flooded me when I stood in front of her. The centaur body is as if all that is screaming NONhuman coalesced and sprung out of this person, overtaking and outpouring over the half of her that never was fully what we think of ourselves as: human. And so I am coming to feel that this place where "two natures" meet is not at our waists, but in every part of us. So diffuse that pointing to the boundary is impossible. 

And because this is shown to us, the audience, in dead bodies, the question of our own (species-level) hybridity conjoins with the question of how we live and die.