In the caves of Lascaux or of Les Trois Frères are kept the most ancient testimonies of what we nowadays call art. And they are images of lions, bears and bulls, among others. From that time onwards, the union between mankind and animals has been registered in all artistic expressions, even in the most radical ones as it is the performance. The most well-known post-war expressions belong to Joseph Beuys with the hare and the coyote; in the first one, he attempted to “explain art to a dead hare”, since he said it was easier than trying to persuade a stubbornly rationalist man. In the other one, I like America, America likes me, the German dramatized the encounter with the instinct, this sensation human beings corner in animals and discredit in human beings. He likes remembering that we are also part of nature and thus, we are full of instincts. On this same path is inscribed the series Latent Fauna by Julieta Anaut. The photographic collage allows her to create surrealist scenes, a magical world with animals that hold talks and live with the characters, all of them feminine ones. As the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich did in his pictures, Julieta also resorts to the ruins of a Christian temple to show the sacred nature of her message. The romantic painter had given up to the dogmatism of religion and thought that the mystery of creation was in nature and not at the church. Likewise, Julieta – in some of her works- places her characters on a stage with the abandoned church as background, setting up a non-institutionalized sacredness.

All the women in Julieta’s photos have some sort of saintliness, either pagan or Christian. In Santuario dorado (Golden Sanctuary) we can see a woman with deer’s horns resting (maybe meditating) in a mountainous landscape, a bit further, there are two bronze statutes who seem worship objects, one is the face of a long-neck woman and the other one of a bovine lying down. The “deer woman” makes us go back to the first times of humanity, the Paleolithic to be more precise, when the fast growth of the horns referred to the waxing moon phase and thus the life generating principle. This way, the goddess’s fertile force became a serpent, a dog, a fish, a butterfly, a bee and other so many epiphanies.  The birds appear once and again in Julieta’s photos, perhaps as a metaphor of the soul that takes flight, although there are more precise symbols, as the owl, an attribute belonging to the wise Palas Atenea. Iguanas, dogs, crows and some other animals move around in Latent Fauna, in Julieta’s photos appear peers of the woman as the same and not as beasts created by God to be dominated by mankind, as established by the Genesis. Julieta’s works have made it possible that landscape, woman and fauna recover that mystic union that integrated us into the universe, the alchemists’ “unus mundus”.

Julio Sánchez, Buenos Aires, 2012. 

Curatorial text of the series for the solo exhibition “Latent Fauna” at Centro Cultural Viedma (Río Negro), Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Sánchez (Río Negro), 2012, and Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Dr. Urbano Poggi (Santa Fe), 2013. Project developed with an individual creation grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes. Published in the catalogue Latent Fauna, 2012.