![\"seraina-dur-&-jonas-gillmann\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Seraina-DurJonas-Gillmann_Agilitypark_2020_03.jpg\")
Agilitypark<\/em>, 2020.
Photo: Anne Linke, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Multiple studies of tombstones at pet cemeteries in the US and the UK note increased references to family ties and titles after the Second World War.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Eric Tourigny, \u201cDo all dogs go to heaven? Tracking human-animal relationships through the archaeological survey of pet cemeteries,\u201d Antiquity<\/em> 94, no. 378 (2020): 1614\u200a\u2013\u200a29.<\/span> Where previously, other-than-human animal companions had been referred to on tombstones as \u201cpets\u201d or \u201cdear friends,\u201d at this time words like \u201cmommy\u201d and \u201cbaby\u201d begin to appear more frequently.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Stanley Brandes, \u201cThe Meaning of American Pet Cemetery Gravestones,\u201d Ethnology<\/em> 48, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 99\u200a\u2013\u200a118. During this same period, pets were increasingly given human names, as opposed to \u201cpet names\u201d such as \u201cFreckles\u201d and \u201cSnowie.\u201d<\/span> The desire to arrange modern mortuary services for a pet, as one would for a parent, partner, sibling, or child, is a telling sign of the feelings people have for their family pets, but also of the economies that grow to meet, and exploit, them. The pet cemetery shows that other-than-human life, in many contexts not legible as grievable, can become so when an animal has been assimilated into the family through cohabitation and naming.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - David Redmalm, \u201cPet grief: when is non-human life grievable?,\u201d The Sociological Review<\/em> 63, no. 1 (2015): 19\u200a\u2013\u200a35.<\/span> It is a space where the highly demonstrative nature of the love that a caretaker\/parent feels for their nonhuman companion\/child\u200a\u2014\u200athe expression of which sometimes seems to exceed the intensity and sweetness of the love shown for human family members\u200a\u2014\u200acan be understood. The uncanny, possessive, and fungible nature of this bond is equally evident there. Seoul-based photographer Hyewon Keum captured various pet memorial and mortuary institutions in South Korea, Japan, and the US in her series Cloud Shadow Spirit<\/em> (2013\u200a\u2013\u200a14). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Her photographs affirm the entrenched familiality of the pet as a current, international phenomenon. In one image, a small, white\u200a\u2014\u200aand very obviously dead\u200a\u2014\u200adog, its limbs and torso wrapped in cloth, is seen laid out on a marble altarpiece with incense and candles before an abundance of artificial flowers. The shrine dominates the vulnerable animal\u2019s dejected body in the composition. While taking photographs in a columbarium, Keum observed people who came and left letters for their deceased companions every day and found that \u201cthey mostly called their beloved animals their sons, daughters, little brothers, or sisters.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Hyewon Keum, artist statement on \u201cCloud Shadow Spirit,\u201d accessible on artist\u2019s website.<\/span> She has also captured the ways that pets can be memorialized quite differently from human family members in a sub-series of Cloud Shadow Spirit<\/em> focused on portrait-style images of freeze-dried pets that she calls Still Life<\/em>. In this form of taxidermy, human affection for and aesthetic subjugation of the nonhuman companion are literally reified\u200a\u2014\u200athe body becoming a thing only to be looked at, thought about, and perhaps later disposed of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The emotional and material labour of mourning is of course but one, final onus of family entanglement. Before that come the obligations of often daily care, communication, and affection. Along these lines, another response to the perception of a growing familiality of the pet in the twentieth century is furnished by the literary scholar Marc Shell in his 1986 essay \u201cThe Family Pet.\u201d Shell posits that affection for the pet, when regarded as a family member, involves the sublimation of both bestiality and incest in the form of a human love bond with a nonhuman being that is at once endogamous (the pet is thought of as kin) and exogamous (the pet is not of the same kind).6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Marc Shell, \u201cThe Family Pet,\u201d Representations<\/em> 15 (Summer 1986): 121\u200a\u2013\u200a53. The previous year, Marriage & Family Review<\/em> had devoted a special issue to the topic of pets in family systems; see vol. 8, no. 3\u200a\u2013\u200a4 (1985).<\/span> Harberts\u2019s reference to a \u201cyoung mother\u201d in search of \u201csomething to fondle\u201d supports Shell\u2019s argument that eroticism lurks in the language used to describe pets as surrogate family members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Authors after Shell have since raised further and sometimes troubling questions about the nature of the love and kinship bonds between human and pet, pointing to the risk that anthropocentric projection will dominate and distort an inherently asymmetrical power dynamic. To this point, cultural theorist Dominic Pettman has asked whether humans treat their dogs as \u201caffection machines.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Dominic Pettman, \u201cAffection,\u201d in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies<\/em>, eds. Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach, and Ron Broglio (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 32.<\/span> Donna Haraway, a leading thinker on the problem of anthropocentrism, advocates for \u201cmaking oddkin\u201d and \u201ckinnovating\u201d across boundaries and categories (not only those of species) as, among other things, ways of \u201cqueer re-worlding.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2\u200a\u2013\u200a4, 102\u200a\u2013\u200a03, 208\u200a\u2013\u200a10; Donna J. Haraway, \u201cCompanion Species, Mis-recognition, and Queer Worlding,\u201d in Queering the Non\/Human<\/em>, eds. Myra J. Hird and Noreen Giffney (London: Routledge, 2008), xxiii\u200a\u2013\u200axxvi.<\/span> In her framing of the relationships between companion species (a name by which she refers to both humans and nonhumans, together), Haraway casts both parties as capable of response, care, and failure. Kinship and companionship\u200a\u2014\u200aeating together, listening to each other, living with the limits of one another\u2019s autonomy\u200a\u2014\u200aare things that she thinks are mutually possible between humans and nonhumans. This is why she warns that \u201cto regard a dog as a furry child, even metaphorically, demeans dogs and children\u201d and risks harming each.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness<\/em> (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 37.<\/span> She also warns against the expectation of, or belief in, \u201cunconditional love\u201d that some people claim as a virtue of dog companionship, calling it equally abusive. Indeed, if some dogs are sometimes able to perform in the role of what Pettman calls the \u201caffection machine,\u201d it is because of breeding, socialization, and the need to survive and not because mechanically-reliable affection is an essential quality of dogs. The family pet may be always already queering and posthumanizing bourgeois social structures, even when unacknowledged. Yet, a great deal of care and examination are required for the radical potential of the multispecies family to be realized and for the structural dominion over the other of the human-pet relationship to be mitigated. This should include questioning whether the term or figure of \u201cfamily\u201d is most apt for describing the role of a nonhuman companion animal in a human\u2019s life to begin with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Several contemporary artists have made work that performs multispecies cohabitation and kinship in order to disrupt norms of human and nonhuman relationships. Undoubtedly one of the most provocative projects of this kind is Maja Smrekar\u2019s Hybrid Family<\/em> (2016) from her series K-9_topology<\/em>.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - I have written more extensively on this work elsewhere. See Deirdre M. Smith, \u201c\u2018Heavenly Beings\u2019: Art Facing the Animal in Ljubljana,\u201d Third Text<\/em> 35, no. 2 (2021): 293\u200a\u2013\u200a313.<\/span> As part of Hybrid Family<\/em>, Smrekar did a mostly private performance with two companion dogs, Ada and Byron, in a 112-day residency hosted by the Freies Museum in Berlin. The content of their time together, as offered in photographs by Manuel Vason that constitute the work\u2019s sole documentation, included Smrekar cuddling and playing in the nude with Ada and Byron in a sparsely furnished space. A few of the images show something more unusual: Ada, a puppy at the time, with her mouth at Smrekar\u2019s breast. As one of Hybrid Family<\/em>\u2019scentral provocations, the artist trained her body, absent pregnancy, to produce breast milk to feed Ada. Smrekar bucks the biological imperative to propagate her own species and instead performs an intimate task of biological motherhood with a juvenile of another. She affirms her mammalian nature in the production of breast milk, and her human nature in the technicity of her induced lactation. She pushes the popular notion of the \u201cfur baby\u201d to an extreme. Most of all, she promotes family as a hybridizing, rather than normalizing, group: here, although differences among individuals are traversed, they remain intransigent to dissolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zurich-based artists Seraina D\u00fcr and Jonas Gillmann have been cohabiting with pigeons at a variety of artist residencies in a project they call, Parliament of Things, Animals, Plants, and Algorithms<\/em> (2019\u200a\u2013\u200aongoing).11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Most specifics in this paragraph are from personal email correspondence with D\u00fcr and Gillmann, 2 and 22 August 2022, and from their presentation \u201cSemiotics of Tenderness: Living, Working, and Making Art with Pigeons as an Inter-Species Performance Company,\u201d at the Re-Thinking Agency: Non-Anthropocentric Approaches conference hosted by the University of Warsaw in 2022.<\/span> Whereas Smrekar\u2019s choice of dog cohabitants carries readymade associations of love and domesticity, D\u00fcr and Gillmann have selected a species that presents barriers to companionship. Zurich has implemented harsh population control measures against pigeons, trapping and killing them in large numbers and swapping out their eggs with plastic ones to lower birth rates.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - See \u201cA gamekeeper for the city,\u201d SWI<\/em>, 3 September 2014, accessible online.<\/span> The first four pigeons of the artists\u2019 flock, which has now grown to thirteen, were saved from a city-built pigeon loft in a train station. The lives of pigeons are constrained by human will wherever they reside in Zurich, but in D\u00fcr and Gillmann\u2019s company they are at least sheltered from extermination in the presence of both conspecifics (beings of the same species) and two humans who exhibit a great deal of thoughtfulness about how to coexist with them and meet their needs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although D\u00fcr and Gillmann do not share the perception of pigeons as pests, they nevertheless have found managing life and love with the birds to be a challenge. Living with pigeons demands constant clean-up. The artists have moved between residences at least seven times in three years and each time had to build out lofts that allow the birds to enter and exit. D\u00fcr and Gillmann note that physical expressions of affection are difficult to exchange with the pigeons. The artists are nevertheless motivated, rather than discouraged, by these types of challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although they began with the term in mind, over time D\u00fcr and Gillmann have eased the expectations of cultivating \u201ckinship\u201d per se from their arrangement, including by no longer naming the pigeons in their care. Now the artists focus on the term \u201ctenderness\u201d and the idea of being a multispecies theatre company. Tenderness, in their view, is a mode and ethic of relating, a way of navigating everyday challenges together. The word suggests being kind and caring, but also cautious and flexible. It is unburdened by many of the associations of \u201clove\u201d and \u201ckin.\u201d The etymology of the English word \u201cfamily\u201d actually is, too. The word has at certain points referred to the entire collective of people in a household, including lodgers and boarders. The related Latin words familia<\/em> (referring to household servants) and familiaritas<\/em> (referring to close friendship) suggest that an emotionally and economically complex network of associations is part of the word\u2019s line of descent. In this sense, D\u00fcr, Gillmann, and their flock form an inevitable \u201cfamily\u201d of companions, eating together and sharing a roof, but a far less value-laden one. The tender obligations of care in their family\/flock\/company have also necessitated mourning. When a pigeon in D\u00fcr and Gillmann\u2019s flock named Champ passed away in 2020, the artists had him cremated and continue to transport his ashes between their various lodgings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Familial\/familiar references for nonhuman household companions may also, to a degree, be inevitable. The notion of \u201cfamily\u201d and words like \u201cmother,\u201d \u201cbaby,\u201d \u201csister,\u201d and \u201cbrother\u201d have an undeniable gravity when articulating intimacy. Still, the respectful distancing of the pivot toward the tender management of practicalities, difficulties, and differences beyond (human) kinship, and without (human) names, that D\u00fcr, Gillmann, and their flock model is a healthy one to emulate. To quote Haraway again, \u201cThe permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, and the inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest, commands my respect, whether the other is animal or human.\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto<\/em>, 35\u200a\u2013\u200a36.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n![\"Hyewon-Keum-H39-Cloud-Shadow-Spirits-2013\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Hyewon-Keum_H39-CloudShadowSpirits_2013.jpg\")
H39<\/em>, 2013, from the series Cloud Shadow Spirit<\/em>, 2013-2014.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Hyewon-Keum-Byeol-Cloud-Shadow-Spirits-2013\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Hyewon-Keum_Byeol-CloudShadowSpirits_2013.jpg\")
Byeol<\/em>, 2013, from the series Cloud Shadow Spirit<\/em>, 2013-2014.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Maja-Smrekar-K-9-topology-Hybrid-Family-2016\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Maja-Smrekar_K-9topology-HybridFamily_2016_01.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Maja-Smrekar-K-9-topology-Hybrid-Family-2016\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Maja-Smrekar_K-9topology-HybridFamily_2016_09.jpg\")
K-9_topology: Hybrid Family<\/em>, 2016, produce by
Kapelica Gallery, Slov\u00e9nie.
Photos: courtesy of the artist & Manuel Vason, Berlin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Seraina-DurJonas-Gillmann_TheaterasPigeonloft_2019_05.jpg\")
Theater as Pigeonloft<\/em>, 2019.
Photo: Seraina D\u00fcr, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Seraina-DurJonas-Gillmann_RoughLove_2021_11.jpg\")
Rough Love<\/em>, 2021.
Photo: Nicole Schuck, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO06_Smith_Seraina-DurJonas-Gillmann_Agilitypark_2020_07.jpg\")
Agilitypark<\/em>, 2020.
Photo: Anne Linke, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n