Taxidermy as still life

The natural history museum Luomus was celebrating its 100 year anniversary and were designing an exhibition for small children called Festival in the Forest, the main attraction of which was the recreation of a famous national painting titled Taistelevat metsot (The Fighting Capercaillies) which was done by Ferdinand von Wright in 1886. The five Finnish von Wright brothers were active in the disciplines of art (including nature illustrations and painting), ornithology, science, teaching, and self-taught taxidermy. The composition of the painting was being recreated using taxidermied wood grouse that would be displayed in a diorama designed to look exactly like the forest landscape setting from the original painting. The main goal was to try and capture the same vibrant display of aggression being expressed by the wood grouse from the painting, as the image is of two males competing for mating rites. However, the recreation also evoked memories, for those privy to them, of the resounding historical connection between the brothers and the museum. Their taxidermied specimens grace the shelves of the large animals archive nestled deep beneath the exhibit in the basement of the building. In its grandeur, the finished taxidermy inspired reproduction filled the room with spectres of the past, a work of art haunted, not only by it’s imperfect attempt to re-present Taistelevat metsot in it’s idea form, but also by what escapes representation (Derrida, 1994). That which still lives on, sedimented within the livelihoods of the museum, its visitors and patrons.

The soundscape that accompanies this story was created for and recorded in the museum exhibition space. Its combined ambiance of croaking frogs and tweeting birds envelops us within a multispecies atmosphere. Histories of nonhuman Others begin to subtly matter as their voices resonate worldly sound taking us beyond our immediate perception into the imagined spaces in which they sit and sing. Visual aesthetics conjoined with these sounds form an assemblage evoking an affective atmosphere filled with curiosities. Curiosity leading us to slow down and attend to that which still lives on, that which demands to be felt in all its un-representable presences.