8th April - more animation experiments
Continuing with the plasticine animation experiments… (more text underneath videos)
I’ve been thinking about thresholds and how the places (or gaps) where two things meet are often considered to be vulnerable to attracting evil spirits. They can also be spaces where magical transformation can occur. Demons can enter our world through liminal spaces, like keyholes or openings or mirrors. In some cultures mirrors are covered during funerals to prevent other entities from crossing over via the mirror into our world.
Monkeys and other non-human primates can be seen as creatures on a threshold - between ourselves and the rest of the animal kingdom. Often appearing in the margins of medieval manuscripts mimicking humans, they are often depicted as a debased version of our own imitations of the divine. Lucifer was seen as the “ape of God”, imitating God as apes apparently imitate humans.
Seeming to challenge our ‘special status’ and dominion over the rest of the natural world, the monkey was seen as problematic to the medieval mind.
I’ve been playing with plasticene, starting to try to explore some of these thoughts about thresholds.
Being on a threshold themselves, I’m wanting to explore the medieval idea of monkeys being in association historically with the devil and sin. Medieval bestiaries moralised animals, with each animal being considered to have been given to us by God as an allegorical tool to teach us a moral lesson.
Even now, it seems we still moralise nature and our relationship with non-human primates is still complex. The portrayal of monkeys and apes in the media (whether it is “cute” videos of pet monkeys dressed in human clothes on Instagram, stories of chimp warfare or recent news stories about “vengeful” monkeys killing puppies) might demonstrate this complex relationship.
I am curious about the extent at which this may have helped contribute to the fragile conservation status of non-human primates (more than 60% of primate species are threatened with extinction).
