RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS67by texts and photographic images. This project revealed the entangle-
ments in which the dynamics of natural history display are regularly
caught. It deconstructed its most pronounced rhetorical structures, re-
vealing the systems of power relations that are historically inscribed in
such displays. It categorically refused dramatization and suppressed any
opportunity for the “sublime animal” to surface. This ultimately is one of
the most important objectives of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s works: to en-
courage a cognitive awareness in the viewer, an awareness capable of gen-
erating a temporary disruption and a shift in the modalities of thinking
about human/animal relationships. Their views are substantially aligned
with Lippit’s perspective that living animals are made to disappear through
representation for the purpose of being assimilated in human discourses.^82
This condition metaphorically prevents them from truly dying—through
language and other representational modalities, animals generally van-
ish. This conception is articulated by Lippit through an interpretation of
Leibniz according to which only the “souls of rational creatures are
prone to creation and destruction.”^83 The animal as automata, the ani-
mal as expendable resource, is central to Cartesian philosophy and to the
conception of animals in modernity. It is that which enables the ethical
suspension in animal consumption, or that which enables multiple reg-
isters of rendering to relentlessly transform and synthesize animals in
endless material figurations. The commodification of animals simulta-
neously is the cause and effect of this impossibility of dying—commodi-
fication enables the systematic killing, it organizes the material substitu-
tion of an animal with equivalent one, and in the case of domesticated
animals, it endlessly multiplies them. It is for these reasons that Snæb-
jörnsdóttir/Wilson are interested in recovering the sociocultural and
economic milieus in which animal commoditization unfolds, problema-
tizing the philosophical paradigms that enable this condition to emerge.
To the artists, the bodies of living animals, like those of animals photo-
graphed, painted, or appearing in texts, are always sites constructed by
symbolic representations that inscribe this impossibility of animal
death. This is the tragic essence of human/animal relations that their work
attempts to highlight and circumnavigate.
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s ethnographically informed methodolo-
gies rely on long-term relational and socially engaged practices.^84 They
collect narrative evidence for the purpose of recovering human/animal