A look at the work of artists crossing the species barrier
The woman stands next to the horse in a bare white room. She is dressed in close-fitting black from chin to toes; the horse wears its own close-fitting black skin. Neither look comfortable: the horse’s ears are back and wary, his forelegs straddling the floor, head high; the woman is perched on long, rigid prostheses constructed from metal rods to imitate his limbs. What you cannot see in this instant is that the woman’s veins are filled with immunoglobulins taken from the blood of three horses, injected into her just minutes ago by her colleague. On the spindly fake hooves she is perched between species. She has started a fever, and nobody knows what will happen next.
Crossing the species barrier: the same term is used for zoonotic diseases that begin in animals and end in humans, like coronavirus, and the idea that a human can become an animal. In French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s preternatural 2019 memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, the author’s recovery from a bear attack in Siberia becomes a journey across this boundary. Her informants among the local Even people tell her she is now partly the bear that stalked her dreams for months before she fought him on a volcano’s slopes. The bear broke her face and lacerated her scalp and leg, carrying off bone and teeth. She has been transformed physically by the creature, and in local belief they were destined for one another – she sought out the bear and he her. The process was violent and dangerous, and that, it strikes me, is as it should be. It is no small matter to become a hybrid.
The woman standing by the horse in a Ljubljana gallery in 2011 was the French artist Marion Laval-Jeantet, one half of Art Orienté Objet, with her partner Benoît Mangin. The pair’s “slow art” often toys with species boundaries. They have made a coat from roadkill and communicated with giraffes with a swaying puppet giraffe head. They tattooed endangered species on skin that combined their cells and those of a pig. For the 2011 artwork, May the Horse Live Inside Me, Laval-Jeantet found a Swiss laboratory willing to inject her with 40 different families of equine immunoglobulins so that she could literally carry the three horses inside her. She had hoped to become a vessel for a vanishing species, like the panda, but settled for the horse, despite fearing it, because she wanted to evoke the mythological heritage of human-horse hybrids. It was an astonishing risk to take, although the antibodies had been rendered safe, and she had prepared for months with smaller injections. Still, a researcher who attempted this with porcine immunoglobulins was pitched into a coma. When untreated human and horse blood are tipped into a petri dish, the cells destroy one another.
Since I started writing books about humans and horses I have come across many fantasies about becoming a horse
Since I started writing books about humans and horses I have come across many fantasies, from literature to modern child’s play, about becoming a horse. They encompass two contradictory notions: one of the absolute freedom of the wild horse, and one of being dominated, harnessed and even beaten and thus obtaining release. In the 2022 film Piaffe by Ann Oren, a mousy woman grows a mare’s tail and finds liberation through BDSM. “Freedom” was the unspoken theme behind the childhood memories of the women I interviewed about tossing imaginary manes and cantering like mustangs in the playground.