ISSUE #2

The second edition of Octopus “Wild Words — Remembering and imagining human and animal relationships” aligns with the major international group exhibition Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives, on view at the museum until mid-February 2026.

Τhe exhibition addresses the complex, ambiguous and often highly problematic relationship between humans and animals in the age of modernity. Inspired by the seminal 1980 text of the same name by John Berger, the exhibition explores the animal-human relationship during modernity and how animals have become marginalised in human societies. Why Look at Animals? aims to engender a long-overdue a discussion around the ethics and politics of how we treat animals, emphasising the need to recognise non-human life as equal and important to our own lives. Τhis discussion which places the rights of non-human life at its epicentre, is both long-overdue and imperative, as is a radical rethinking of the way we treat animals. We cannot talk about environmental justice without taking non-human animals into consideration.

The aim of this broader project which includes this publication is to bring to light how non-human life has been systematically and increasingly been radically degraded since the advent of modernity, and how billions of non-human beings are subjected to widespread exploitation and violence on a daily basis, a fact which we largely ignore. The issue is not only a moral one, but is also deeply political, as the mechanisms of modern production and consumption deliberately conceal the systematic abuse of non-human life. The exhibition, public and education programme as well as this publication, aim to bring this invisible violence to light by making us aware of the ways in which animals are exploited, neglected and made to ‘disappear’.

An important segment of the exhibition makes reference to the separation of humans from animals, mainly through the processes of colonisation and industrialisation. In his book Berger already pointed out that animals were once central to human societies, part of our daily life and imagination, whereas now– with the exception of pets – they have become displaced from the realm of our experience and replaced by images and products. Τoday, we encounter them as meat on supermarket shelves, as spectacle in zoos, as anthropomorphised abstractions in cartoons, or as objects of lifeless entertainment in toys. The dominant human understanding of them as products has rendered them “Other”, not as intrinsic, sentient beings in their own right, possessing both intelligence and will. The early modern notion of the bête-machine (animal-machine), popularised by Descartes has been debunked by advances in animal studies and by fields like neuroethology, which scientifically demonstrate that animals possess complex sensory worlds and emotional capacities.

Why Look at Animals? – together with its public and education programme as well as this magazine- invites us to consider the animal not as “Other,” but as a being with a “voice” of its own, capable of artfulness, play, socialisation and transformation. Central to this is the idea that we should understand animals not as objects, but as subjects: not as ‘something’, but as ‘someone’. This subversion of the human perspective and a rejection of speciesm – the dominant assumption of the superiority of the human species – must constitute the foundation for a new ethical ecological thinking and practice.

Complementary to the exhibition but also somewhat different in content, the texts featured in “Wild Words — Remembering and imagining human and animal relationships”, the second issue of Octopus, examine the destiny of non-human lives as a reflection of and entaglement with the destiny of humans. It is not a coincidence both an exhibition and an issue of a magazine – whose aim is the political imperative to reveal what remains subaltern and invisible because of dominant speciesist hierarchies – is concurrent our dark historical moment in which war, military crimes, and the prevalence of overt absolutism seek the deliberate annihilation of social, political, racial and gendered subalterns. Empathy for animals and the assertion of their rights to natural life and wellbeing can only be part of a wider demand for justice, self-determination and dignity. And vice versa: the claim for equality and enlightened governance cannot ignore non-human lives, i.e. must take into account the whole of life as a single, inter-connected system that constitutes our fragile biosphere.

We have invited the curator and writer Filipa Ramos as guest editor of “Wild Words” as her  research has systematically focused on the relationships between contemporary art, theory and ecology and especially with the poetics of non-human life. The newly commissioned essays in this issue examine the symbiosis of species, in light of citizenship and philia, in the sense that this word has in ancient Greek philosophy and survives to the present day; that is, as an affective relationship within and for the city. From the pre-modern transformations of fertility rites to the contemporary entanglements of ecofeminism with antispeciesist activism and the shared meals of human and non-human bodies; from symbiosis in the everyday life of the pandemic crisis to the contaminated bodies of humans and non-humans in radioactive areas; from animal breeding as a colonial mechanism to our ambiguous relationship with horses and cattle, objects of both desire and power, the texts in this issue are an anthology of stories of repression but also of coexistence and care. Images from artist Michela de Mattei’s archive run through the issue, creating a separate subtext on the absence and reappearance of thylacines as evidence of an implicit and haunting question: is coexistence with non-human life after all impossible, or is it but a ghost made of guilt?

We are delighted that “Octopus’ Garden”, the special audiovisual archive of Octopus, includes new works by the seminal artist and activist Sue Coe, who is also participating in the exhibition Why Look at Animals? The illustrations were commissioned especially for the magazine and in relation to the textual content. We are grateful to the artist for her contribution. Maria Tsagakri’s new audio documentary The Blissful Have No Past is included in “Octopus’s Garden” archive, offering new insight into the underappreciated Greek animalier Euripidis Vavouris, who was active in the post-war period. In the near future, “Octopus’ Garden” will be enriched with further audio works by artists and researchers working with animal sounds, selected by curator Joanna Zielinska, whose project Sonic Space is featured within the exhibition Why Look at Animals? at EMΣΤ. We are grateful to everyone who has contributed to this issue.

The next issue will be out in December 2025.

Katerina Gregos & Theophilos Tramboulis

Credits

Translations: Humphrey Brunch, Ifigenia Doumi, Spyros Petrounakos, Eliza Jackson

Text editor: Vassilis Douvitsas

Design and development: Nowhere Design

Social Media communication: Klara Tsoumpleka