RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS69Their work between you and me comprises six short films, each pre-
senting different ontological registers in which human/seal relationships
are recovered in their sedimentations. Thus, in some of the films, seals are
visually present, and in others they appear through spoken Icelandic
words and in the superimposed English subtitles—the linguistic utter-
ance is here the equivalent of the taxidermy animal skin: a liminal point
of contact between animal and human, but always one in which the ani-
mal nonetheless remains absent (plate 1). In one of the videos, titled the
naming of things, the artists filmed a taxidermist molding the skin of a
seal into a representation of itself. Here, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson derail
the convention of the documentary genre in order to prevent realism
from constructing a symbolically burdened animal, one shaped by meta-
narratives. Thus the frame is vertical rather than horizontal. This dis-
rupts the perceptual (approximate) analogy between the human scopic
field and the cinematic lexis. This simple rotation of the frame already
constitutes a powerful derailment of the “suspension of disbelief ” status,
which essentially constitutes a critical inhibitor in the viewer. This initial
challenge is further problematized by the close-ups of the taxidermist’s
hands, the polystyrene body, and the animal skin. Close-ups are effec-
tively used to fragment the surface of the animal body, indissolubly
merging it with the manipulating human hands. Importantly, the animal
body-shape never fully appears in the frame, and neither does the body
of the taxidermist. Not even at the end, nor at the beginning, is the full ani-
mal body shown as a whole or complete. Rather, the viewer’s desire to see a
naturalistic mounted body, the result of a linear process, is frustrated by a
final partial view of the head of the seal mount, which appears uncun-
ningly animated yet far from the livingness of naturalistic realism.
Further deliberate derailment of the realistic syntax in the filmic com-
ponents is operated by the slowing of the footage. In classical cinematog-
raphy, slow motion is typically employed to emphasize a specific moment
or to dramatize, to elevate a transcendental moment from the realistic
spatiotemporal dimension inhabited by the surrounding footage. How-
ever, by also slowing the soundtrack, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson achieve an
antiheroic effect in which slow motion becomes another active device in
the obstruction of the realistic lexicon. The overall result is one in which the
struggle involved in pulling the skin, and the resistance that its materiality
poses to the hands of the taxidermist, are sensually accentuated.