RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS65works as a crux of past and present discourses and practices that can
never be reduced to the internal economies of the work of art, or simply
to artistic discourses. It always, and insistently, gestures to the outside,
to the past, to the present, and it regularly provides a platform upon
which the possibility of different futures can emerge.
Many examples of speculative taxidermy present an ethnographic lin-
eage in which indexicality plays an indispensable evidential role. But this
ethnographic lineage is usually inscribed in the work for the purpose of
subverting the sweeping generalizations typical of the processes of other-
ing that characterized past ethnographic approaches. It is an element that
points toward particularities of experience. It capitalizes on a broaden-
ing of sensory and affective registers beyond those culturally pre-encoded
in the aesthetic experience. The new forms of representation that incor-
porate this ethnographic lineage do so to very different degrees and in
many and varied ways. The most overt manifestation of this inclination
in works of art is at times clearly visible in the deliberate positioning of
the artist as pseudoethnographer, or in the methods used, the display so-
lutions adopted, or the range of materialities displayed. At other times
the ethnographic vein runs deeper, embedded in multiple layers of mate-
riality and processes, where it gestures intermittently, flickers, or alludes.
In a number of ways, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s multimedia project be-
tween you and me (2009) entails many of the leading threads untangled
in this chapter. But most importantly, it also shifts the methodological
approach thus defined to the specifics of the artistic context: it problema-
tizes and expands important concepts related to biography and the cul-
tural lives of animals, and it fragments perceptual modes through the use
of different materialities and the mediation of ontologically distinct but
interrelated representational registers.
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s between you and me focuses on the relation-
ship of humans and seals because of the animals’ substantial historical
importance as subsistence for human beings living in the coastal towns
of Iceland. This shared past generates traces of human/animal relation-
ships in the form of food, clothing, or other anthropocentric forms of
representation.^80 The artists are thus concerned with instances in which
the animal becomes a commodity, for this is the undeniable condition
underpinning the unfolding of human/animal relations. They are inter-
ested in the different points in which that relationship shifts commodity