254CODA
are spoiled, violated.”^15 This operation evokes physical pain in a site in
which the animal body that could experience such feeling has been made
absent. The impossibility of an empathic relationship is thus inscribed in
a connection that returns us to a notion of distance, one that takes the
viewer to an aesthetic dimension in which the life-size taxidermy sur-
face bursts into a vast expanse. Too close to ignore in its material pres-
ence and simultaneously too far away to be fully comprehended, the pins
derail the viewer’s sense of scale and dimensionality by simultaneously
posing as stars, bees, ants, gnats, or bacteria. This deliberate disorientation
alludes to the metasublime challenges of the Anthropocene, in which no-
tions of deep time push the impact of human activity on this planet to the
very surface of a depth we cannot possibly comprehend. Thus, unortho-
doxically inserted, the pins are evidenced as tools of power, order, deter-
mination, and identification marking a new and intrinsic impossibility of
being. Might these abstract swarms represent the possibility to reconnect
us with the nonscientific, mythological dimension of the ritual bougonia as
a portal through which we can rewind time for the purpose of considering
human/bovine/bee relationships outside of the contemporary capitalist
scale of interest that relentlessly reduces human, animal, insect, and veg-
etal lives into the flatness of data, figures, and graphs?
With its poetic and sharply symbolic proposal for a sacrificial antidote
to ecosystemic collapse, Out of the Strong, Something Sweet (plate 12) situates
itself at the heart of the current anthropogenic crisis: on the symbolic
register, the materialities it incorporates harness notions of propitiation,
loss, purification, transmutation, regeneration, consumption, domestica-
tion, objectification and exploitation. In the face of ultimate life-threats, the
means through which propitiation could be secured entails the rather
cunning proposal of sacrificing cows to resuscitating bees: a plea for a
sustainable human/animal/environmental coexistence. Thus, Bougonia
metaphorically functions as a precapitalist, speculative tool; it derails regis-
ters of scientific and optical realism to questions our scientific certainties
built on an ultimately destructive distancing from the natural world.
Simultaneously, it gestures toward alternative registers of perceptual re-
alism and empathic identification that could support future, sustainable
ecological models. As scientific knowledge develops its analytical tools
and shifts its goals according to contemporary capitalist discourses, what
cannot be thought by science that might bear important repercussions? Out