246CODAand manipulated for the purpose of connecting us to a long-lost dimen-
sion: a prelinguistic relationship with other animals, environments, and
ultimately ourselves. But of course its usefulness in this task its only illusory.
In the oxymoronic aesthetic game that defines taxidermy animal skin, maxi-
mum visibility always equates to utter invisibility, closeness is the ultimate
distance, and possession entails the deepest loss.
It is in this context that Cole Swanson’s installation titled Out of the
Strong, Something Sweet (2016) operates a series of ontological derailments
designed to map the intermingling of multispecies relationships con-
nected by mythical, transhistorical, and material connections. Sidestepping
modern scientific models and incorporating a multimedia approach
that involves taxidermy, sound, painting, drawing, and sculpture, Swan-
son constructs an “enchanted” epistemological space in which the body of
the viewer is mobilized by multiple representational strategies. As a complex
example apparatus incorporating speculative taxidermy, this installation
centers on different notions of mimesis and indexicality, their potential
ability to structure different registers of realism, and the indexical mate-
riality through which realist narratives are implicitly validated.
Focusing on the deconstruction and reconfiguration of human/animal
worldings, Out of the Strong, Something Sweet recovers an important tri-
angulation of interdependency connecting humans, honeybees, and bo-
vines. Both honeybees and bovines have long histories of transspecies
becomings. Examples of Egyptian art show that the domestication of bees
could have occurred almost 5,000 years ago,^5 whereas the domestication
of bovines began roughly 10,500 years ago.^6 The entanglements of “be-
coming with” that have defined our relationships with these animals are
many and are today naturalized enough to no longer be visible. As we
know, both bovines and bees, for different reasons, play extremely impor-
tant roles in our capitalist cycles of production and consumption and, by
implication, in ecosystems. A tangible sign of anthropogenic environ-
mental unbalances is, in fact, the current collapse of bee populations
around the world. Suddenly, the interconnectedness between pollinators,
meat production, and mass agricultural processes has been exposed as a
fracture in the illusion that we might have successfully mechanized na-
ture’s process enough to get along without insects. Thus, the conflicts of
interest between efforts to keep parasites off plants, the use of pesticides
and neonicotinoids, and the need to allow bees to pollinate have become
more and more pressing over the past ten years. It is in this context that