The Spirits of Vanishing Animals. Die Rote Liste

The Spirits of Vanishing Animals

Radegast is a picturesque village in the Elbe marshes with just under 400 inhabitants. Forty years ago, the artist created a refuge within this cozily idyllic setting, which features brick farmsteads, the river, wild game, and birds. Her property is covered with trees and shrubs, and the large glass panes of her studio provide a view of the expansive, flat landscape.

In this “Paradise” (FRANEK), the presence of nature has deepened her connection with and attunement to fauna and flora. FRANEK, a city kid who grew up in the coal country of the Ruhr valley and has been living in the metropolis of Berlin for 65 years, brought an affinity for non-human creatures – as demonstrated by drawings she made as a child. Encounters with animals, such as coyotes in the Americas in the 1980s, made a strong impression on her – and so did the crossing of boundaries between animals and human beings and plants in the rituals and myths of various cultures, particularly indigenous, Native American and Ancient Egyptian. Many works from past decades reflect this material and her engagement with and assimilation of it.

In recent, years she has created paintings of birds in small, medium, and large formats. Using her own generous and rapid manner of painting, a testament to decades of practice, FRANEK depicts them in keeping with their own distinctive character, be it the splendid colors of the hoopoes’ feathers or the remarkably long beak of the curlew – characteristic features that developed in the course of evolution and astound as well as enchant us with their fantastic diversity and a beauty that ranges from the ravishing to the bizarre. A number of images show the birds communicating and interacting with hybrid creatures that are part human and part plant. The artist, to whom the folkloric world of European legends opened itself in Radegast, refers to these fabulous creatures as mandrakes. Because of their anthropomorphic roots and psychoactive substances, this plant has become intertwined with magical notions and been seen as an enigmatic, kobold-like creature.

On the one hand, the interweaving of human and plant life draws on past and present myths and spiritual perspectives; on the other hand, it points to a future in which – as outlined by Donna Haraway – the boundaries between human beings and other species will become permeable.[i] In this constellation with birds, FRANEK fancifully and poetically visualizes the repositioning of human beings within the complex web of other life forms – the connectivity, symbiosis, and sympoiesis represented by Haraway as well as Bruno Latour, James Lovelock, and Lynn Margulis within their own fields of scientific and philosophical research. In her inspiring book The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, Margulis writes: “Human similarities to other life-forms are far more striking than the differences. Our deep connections, over vast geological periods, should inspire awe, not repulsion.”[ii] Alongside the natural sciences, other systems of knowledge regarding flora, fauna, and human beings transmitted by indigenous communities have drawn new attention in the Anthropocene.

The Spirits of Vanishing Animals is a hymn to nature – and, even more so, a requiem. The simple slate tablets testify to this: we are admonished by their form, which is reminiscent of a gravestone. They bear finely drawn images of birds from the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources accompanied by brief, handwritten notes about their extinction or their endangerment status.[iii] The main causes of the extinction of species are habitat competition, invasive species, illegal hunting, environmental pollution, and climate change. FRANEK has dedicated a series to mammals, in which older etchings dealing with the theme of transience have been utilized as the support on which the images are painted. The ruin-like masonry and the prone corpses place the animals within the context of a collapsed culture or in the midst of surroundings doomed to collapse. The sources for these pictures range from digital images from the internet to old photos and graphic works to photographs from museums of natural history.

Taken as a whole, this group of works can be described as a synthesis of natural-historical, artistic, and narrative ways of viewing and representing. It is a work in progress, a running list of monstrous losses. Will the only thing to survive the sixth mass extinction event – the one caused by human beings – be the bacteria that have already existed for around 3.5 billion years?[iv]

Brigitte Hausmann

[i] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC, 2016).

[ii] Lynn Margulis, The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London, 1999), pp. 4f.

[iii] https://www.iucnredlist.org/.

[iv] See Ulrich Kutschera, “Wie scheitern Gewinner? Beispiele aus der Evolutionsgeschichte,” in: Struggle for Life: Artenwandel und Artensterben im Anthropozän, exh. cat., ERES-Stiftung (Heidelberg: Kehrer 2008), p. 105.