Artist Meets Archive #4: "Footprints on the Sands of Time"

Animals and their life stories are only sparsely visible in a city’s history, as in the case of the chimpanzee Petermann, who mounted a spectacular escape from Cologne Zoo in 1985. His visage, propagated in numerous photographs, has become part of the city’s visual memory, unlike the countless animals that populate the conurbation with us, day in, day out. In her project, Marta Bogdańska looks for ways of occupying a non-anthropocentric perspective in the archive and its materials as a discursive space, a space which focuses primarily on a history of humanity and, in so doing, excludes the animal as agent. By juxtaposing historical photographs with video works produced in Cologne, the project intends to sound out the coexistence between humans and “non-human animals”.