The Octopus’s Eight Animal Legs

Thylacines, also known as the Tasmanian tigers, were predatory marsupials inhabiting the dry eucalyptus forests, wetlands, and grasslands of mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania. They resembled primitive dogs, large and short-haired, with a stiff tail and stripes across their body. Like many other animals, thylacines didn’t make it through Modernity. It is believed that the last known living specimen died in captivity in the early 20th century, a victim of anthropogenic action. A short film from 1935, preserved by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, shows a captive thylacine pacing back and forth in her1 enclosure while a zookeeper brutally knocks on the side of the cage to trigger some sort of reaction in the clearly distressed animal.2 Alone in a cage and in the world, detained in real life and captured by film, about to die as an individual and a species, this creature was not a metaphor of a world that was coming to end or a symbol of the brutal decimation of indigenous peoples and beings and the violence of settler-colonialism. She was its reality.

Over the last few years, artist Michela de Mattei has been developing a project entitled True Believers See More Patterns, which materialises as an image archive and a video. For it, she has been collecting online video footage of recent thylacine sightings, most of which were posted on online community forums by people who refuse to believe that they are extinct. Her archive grows as every new evidence emerges. While revealing the animals observed – many of which are spectres of a mammal that could also be a dog, a dingo, a large rodent, or a cat – what this research also reveals is how some people refuse to admit that they live in a world whose damage is beyond repair. This form of denial turns the animals into ghosts, spectres that haunt humanity, leading people to search for creatures that have long vanished and preventing them from accepting their own errors, for if a Tasmanian tiger is found, maybe not everything is lost. The slim possibility of the animals’ survival brings hope for a world in peril.

Some of the images that de Mattei has been collecting have been selected as headers for each text that is featured in “Wild Words — Remembering and imagining human and animal relationships”, the current issue of Octopus, which is dedicated to animals and edited in response to the “Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives” exhibition at EMΣT (Summer 2025). Together, arranged by tones, the pictures create a spectrogram of these ghostly presences. Individually, they reveal how hard, but also how easy, it is to capture an animal. For if the presence of an animal we may encounter remains imprinted in our memory or is easily captured by a film strip, something in them always escapes and refuses to be controlled. This tension between time and image, possibility and reality, shapes the unique, beautiful, and troubled relationship that we, peculiar animals called humans, have entailed with our animal peers. This issue of the Octopus, arranged in eight texts/legs, aims at staying with these tensions while updating the themes, voices, and agendas that shape thinking, feeling, and writing about animals in their intersection with art. As the tone set by reflection about the thylacines would lead you to imagine, this is not a happy, light-hearted, cheerful issue. It addresses matters of displacement, abuse, oppression, and exclusion that reflect the way (some) humans treat animals but also about how these practices have been rehearsed and perfectioned on other species to be subsequently applied to fellow humans. But it also addresses the unique manifestations of love, compassion, admiration, and companionship that occur, sometimes, when humans and animals meet.

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A red squirrel jumping in a forest for a fleeting second, a seal resting on a beach shore, a fox trotting across the city at night, a group of goats crossing a dusty road, a school of fish swimming close to a boat in a port, a mouse quickly traversing the metro lines, a moth flying around a city light: you are probably familiar with some of these scenes, which may have remained imprinted in your memory because they felt special, rare, or maybe strange. Some of them may play in your mind like a movie when you think about them, existing beyond meaning and words as glimpses of a surprising, unexpected encounter. There is something unique, almost magical, in crossing paths with an animal.3 When another creature enters your field of vision, temporality changes. The vision of an animal suspends, dilates, and expands the linear flow of time: the haptic qualities of their fur, feathers, or skin; the unique shape of their bodies; their movement and pace; their gaze and behaviour are so mesmerising that they capture our attention in a totalising way. The time of the animal installs itself and shatters human chronological conventions and perceptions. The fascination, pleasure, and thrills of encountering animals led humans to create different apparatuses to observe and represent them, such as cages, tanks, and aquaria, systems that conditioned the moment and freedom of many species who, still today, are condemned to live behind bars because they are too beautiful, strange, rare, or gifted. Immaterial apparatuses of captivity were also created, namely forms of domestication and selective breeding that allured and imposed other species’ closeness to us, particularly those who trust us more, such as cattle, canids, or chicken and other birds.

Art also brought animals close to people, making them permanently accessible, often beyond their physical presence. If animals ignore art – and would probably thrive without art – art would not be the same without its animal figures: creatures of all sorts, real and imagined, that have shaped human creations since the beginning of time. Some of the earliest representations made by humans were of animals, painted with their own blood and engraved with stones and bones on the walls of ancestral caves. Through these representations of aurochs, buffalos, deer, or boar, prehistoric people turned their observations into figures whose symbolic weight also made them more human.

By transforming real animals into representations, humans invented art and, in doing so, invented themselves and even separating themselves from all other beings. They also invented cinema. By painting images of animals on cave walls that mimicked those they chased, early humans invented cinematic time, creating a past and a future. They connected memory to desire, remembrance to anticipation, trauma to anxiety. The images they made could be still, but the stories they told were in motion, animated by the light cast by flickering fires, and they moved those who saw them, taking them beyond the time of the gaze and towards affects that were induced by projection and empathy.4 Cinema emerged from the animals whose images, forever engraved with their own blood and hair, expressed a temporal and spatial movement, forever playing in the minds of those watching them. It is thus not surprising that film is so connected to the animal realm, from its above-mentioned origins in parietal paintings and engravings to the inner materiality of the film strip, which is made of gelatine extracted from the bones, cartilages, and skin of cows and pigs and to the unique ways in which film establishes triangular relationships between animals, camera, and viewers.

Images of animals shape the history of ancient and modern cinema. Shot in the summer of 1878, Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion – a series of “automatic electro-photographs” depicting the movement of a horse – connected photography to cinematic motion and anticipated the arrival of motion pictures. One of the first films ever made, in 1899, was Louis Lumiére’s La petite fille et son chat (The Young Girl and Her Cat), which, as its title announces, depicts the playful interaction between a child and a companion feline. More than a century later, on April 23, 2005, the first video ever uploaded to YouTube was “Me at the zoo”. In it, the internet channel co-founder Jawed Karim commented on the long trunks of a group of elephants at the San Diego Zoo, paving the way for the public, online sharing of private moments which now dominates society.5 In between and after, memorable moments featuring animals have shaped the history of cinema. They have a solid presence in mainstream cinema, such as the coyote scene that interrupts and suspends the flow of Michael Mann’s film Collateral (2004) or the uncanny encounters between the ginger cat Jonesy and the xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s horror film Alien (1979). Animal presences of all sorts also populate arthouse and artists’ cinema. The tiger-ghost that appears at the end of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s memorable film Tropical Malady (2004) creates one of the most mesmerising moments of recent cinema while, for instance, the ongoing collaborations between Joan Jonas and her dogs have added a fundamental interspecies tone to the history of performance and video.

Literature has also had a long engagement with animals, even though words are frequently employed to justify human’s supposed superiority over other species. Yet, if silence unites us all as animals – “is not everybody silent in the same way?” wonders Franz Kafka in his short story “Josephine the Singer or the Mouse Folk” (1924) – words can also bring humans close to other animals. Whether by telling stories of different beings, sharing the results of scientific research, recording and writing history or legislating obligations and conducts, texts for, against, about, or concerning animals have shaped the ways in which they are understood, perceived, treated, and cared for. In “Wild Words — Remembering and imagining human and animal relationships”, different artists and authors express in complementary ways their impressions, knowledge, feelings, and struggles concerning animals. In To Fuck Like Animals, scholar and activist Myriam Bahaffou discusses the intersection of racial, anti-colonial, ecofeminist, and animal rights struggles while observing how much still needs to be done to support the individual and collective rights of people and animals in more consistent, coherent, and caring ways. In his essay Dogs Beyond the Sofa, historian Chris Pearson reflects on how Victorian dog culture permeated the British colonial empire and conditioned the different treatment of imported and local dogs in occupied India. Pursuing a reflection on the sacrificial lives of companion and domesticated animals, artist Janis Rafa, in conversation with the curator of her solo show at ΕΜΣΤ “We Betrayed the Horses” Daphne Vitali, discusses her interest in being close to suffering animals, as manifested through her films and installations. Instead, in Koro’s Diary, poet Gastón Carrasco offers a touching, intimate diary of his life with Koro, a black-and-white cat he shared his small apartment with during the 2020 lockdown in Chile. Together, they sleep, play, write, and look at the empty streets. Wondering “What is a cow” in her text The Sacrifice, writer Daisy Hildyard contemplates about the presence of cows – animals she grew up with – in art, literature, and society. In Zoomorphic Bell-bearers in the Frost, anthropologist Miranda Terzopoulou offers a precise ethnographic account of the ways in which animal figurations appeared in the masks and rituals of ancient and traditional Greece. Imagining a world where animals are no longer considered food but companions – creatures we share our bread and table with – critical theorist Sue Donaldson revisits her canonical vegan recipe collection, Foods That Don’t Bite Back, first published 25 years ago in 2000. Finally, art historian Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou’s essay Pure Fiction invites us to reflect, through a series of historical, literary, and cinematic accounts, about how “Killability and purity discourses seem to go hand in hand, and animals insistently appear to both embody but also negotiate and shutter this uneasy conceptual pair.” The text leaves us with a sense of unease and, alongside the other contributions, it invites us to imagine and desire a humanity that is more reconciled, caring, and loving towards the big animal family it also belongs to.