Last week i visited Betes de Style/Animals With Style at the MUDAC museum in Lausanne.

The exhibition groups together hundreds of design objects and art pieces which invoke the animal world and its place in society, opening the door to fantasies, asking disturbing questions about the unbridled production of objects created “for� animals.

Seven “Acts” open the debate about the true needs of our animals, our desire to train and dominate them, the reasons that make us choose forms mimicking certain animals and that we integrate into the structure of our lives, our attempts to ward off death (?) through trophies or other forms of taxidermy, etc.

Act 1. Animal Mundi, the first part of the exhibition, works as a prologue, an introduction to our relationship with the animal kingdom. The works include Robert Gligorov‘s Dog Kiss (which i found disturbing) and Patrick Van Caeckenbergh‘s Mr. Bondieu (image below.) The best piece of the selection imho is Pierre-Philippe Freymond‘s Chimère 2, a decapitated stuffed animal leaning against a white wall (image on top left corner of this post).

While clicking around Freymond’s portfolio i discovered some puzzling tulip incubators (not included in the Lausanne show but worth a mention just the same.) 110 bulbs float in two sterilized tanks, while tv screens diffuse images of cattle at intervals accompanied by a muffled sound.

The artist, who is also a biologist, incorporated calf DNA and mutagenic substances (commonly used in our food and containing nitrosamine) into the liquid, which the plants risk to absorb and integrate into their genetic inheritance, making the idea of chimera closer to reality.

Although Freymond’s installation makes use of and comments on recent scientific developments, it also fits into the history of gardens where selection processes, based on purely aesthetic genetic modification, are nothing new.

The exhibition runs until February 17