A Swarming, a Wolfing, a Godling
2021 -
on-going artistic research
installation, pictures, found-footage
The last Japanese wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax) was shot in Higashi-Yoshino (Nara Prefecture) in 1905 (Meiji 38). Its corpse was bought by an American zoologist and transported to the Natural History Museum in London, where it stays to this day, stretched unnaturally in a glass case. The attempts of the extermination of wolves have been commonplace around the world. And yet, the case of Japan seems particularly interesting, as it is a country where wolves were once revered as gods. The hatred for wolves was one of the many imports from the West, flooding Japan after Meiji Restoration. As Emperor Meiji took his first bite of beef in 1872 (Meiji 4), the extermination of wolves, informed by wolf-killing specialists invited from The US, began.
“A Swarming, a Wolfing, a Godling” is an on-going artistic research about the artificial division of nature and culture and between the “East” and “West.” I take on the role of a late-19th-century/early 20th-century explorer-scientist to look to the questions of race, roots and hierarchies in the Western scientific paradigm. I follow the track of the extinct Japanese wolves to analyse the space between the myth and the reason, spirituality and science and the difference between animistic and monotheistic understanding of the world. The concept of “the death of God,” articulated by Nietzsche some two decades before the last wolf of Japan was shot in Higashi-Yoshino, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome become a compass in that quest.
