Fauna Obscurus challenges the prevailing anthropocentric ideology that upholds human dominion over animals. The idea of dominion over animals is ordained as our right and mythologized in our culture, religion, science, and imagination. The word “myth” refers to a fictional, often magical story that creates cultural meaning and reaffirms commonly held beliefs within a society. The most prevalent overarching myth about animals, is that they are here for us. This narrative is woven into the rhetoric surrounding the often cruel destiny of animals in medical research. 

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My work in Fauna Obscurus uses the anti-myth to set up a new narrative trajectory that makes space for animal sentience to be recognized by obliterating the old narratives. Fauna Obscurus is an anti-myth, a magical story that negates, thwarts, and obscures prevailing beliefs about laboratory animals. The animals within Fauna Obscurus are an embodiment of the destruction of the traditional rhetoric of the experiment. Animal rights and animal experimentation are topics that our society is generally not interested in. I intend to make animal rights socially desirable by enchanting the viewer with the strangeness, beauty, and mystery of my work. 

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One of the prevailing myths surrounding laboratory animals holds that animals are tools whose inner-workings should be forcibly revealed and manipulated for the “good of human health.” In this archaic ideology, animals are essentially a lens through which to study human diseases. This ideology is still embraced today. The animal experimentation industry projects a nearly magical significance onto the death of the animal. The “noble sacrifice” is transformed into data and its body is discarded. Lab animals are occasionally “honored” with quasi-religious funerary ceremonies and memorial sculptures. Every idea surrounding laboratory animals reinforces the belief that these animals are inevitably destined for use as data. These ideas obscure the animal, rendering it unrecognizable as a being unto itself. For the sentience of animals to be recognized, all of the previous mythology must be obliterated. 

Fauna Obscurus is a fiction that deconstructs the history and philosophy of animal experimentation. Real scientific texts, historical images, and laboratory tools are displayed in tandem with fiction. The rhetoric supporting animal experimentation is suffused throughout culture across a range of media. Fauna Obscurus uses a variety of media to create a mirror image of that rhetoric.

 

In the world of the Fauna Obscurus, reality, philosophy, and ideology all are subsumed into anti-myth. In obliterating the prevailing myth surrounding the lab animal, I allow space for the viewer to consider animals in their own right, and ultimately recognize new narratives that privilege the animals’ agency and perspectives.