Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, educator, and maker specializing in the histories of art and politics of aesthetics in representations of nature in art. He’s the founder and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and US Correspondent for Esse Magazine – Art + Opinion. Aloi is co-editor of the University of Minnesota series ‘Art after Nature’, and has authored four books including Why Look at Plants? – The Vegetal World in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019) and the forthcoming Vegetal Entwinements (2023) co-edited with Michael Marder, and Estado Vegetal (2023). He lectures at museums and universities internationally and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Queen Mary University of London, Goldsmiths, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London and New York. He received his Ph.D. in natural history and contemporary art from Goldsmiths University of London and has worked as an educator at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries.
Speculative Taxidermy: Indexicality, Vulnerability, and Representation
‘Speculative Taxidermy’ is a resolutely non-anthropocentric take on the materiality of one of the most controversial media in contemporary art. It challenges the postcolonial conception of panoptic power, which characterizes natural history taxidermy and dioramas, to pose pressing questions about human-animal liminalities and coevolutions. In opposition to naturalistic taxidermy, in which the hand of the craftsman must conceal its work, speculative taxidermy flaunts the manipulated essence of preserved animal skins as an indelible material-trace of shared pasts and problematic presents. Through its emphasis on materiality, speculative taxidermy reveals the ineluctability of physical and ontological vulnerabilities shared by humans and animals alike. Harnessed by the urgency inscribed in its indexicality, the remodeled animal skin in contemporary art can enable the recovery of cultural inscriptions—stratifications of indissoluble human-animal histories interlacing racial and gender politics, capitalist exploitation, and mass extinction. In the hands of contemporary artists, this non-realistic manipulation can reveal chains of human-animal vulnerability normally concealed by the naturalization of common practices like domestication. It is in this context that speculative taxidermy offers the opportunity to contemplate more ethically, politically, and ecologically sustainable futures.