For the occasion of Zurich Art Weekend 2025, on June 14 and June 15, I led a curated guided tour titled The Captured Animal: Encounter at the ETH Bildarchiv in collaboration with Nicole Graf. Through this tour, international participants were invited to reflect on how animals have been represented, classified, instrumentalized, and looked at within different cultural, scientific, and colonial frameworks. The encounter unfolded in four thematic acts, moving from laboratory spaces to zoos, from taxidermized displays to moments of direct visual contact between human and animal.
Our journey began with images from 1955, taken within the biomedical laboratories of ETH Zurich. Situated at the height of postwar scientific optimism, these photographs record scenes of animal experimentation—moments that promised medical progress, longer life, and technological mastery. Yet beneath the surface of white lab coats and sterilized instruments lies a more troubling narrative: the transformation of animal life into object, material, and data (Vache de race Montbéliarde, 1900, Ans_06108-005-AL-PL). In these images, the animal is both present and absent, rendered invisible by the very processes that depend on its body.
To frame this ethically complex terrain, we drew upon philosopher Jared Christman’s concept of The Gilgamesh Complex—a psychological and cultural impulse to overcome human mortality through the death of animals[1]. This logic, still deeply embedded in contemporary biomedical research, situates the researcher as a kind of modern priest, the laboratory as a quasi-sacred space, and the animal as a sacrificial substitute. This framework invites us to consider not only what the image shows, but what it seeks to naturalize: hierarchies of species, the necessity of suffering, and the invisibility of violence within scientific rationality.
From the sterile order of the lab, we transitioned to more public and popular arenas of animal representation—zoos (see image below: Expo hostesses with elephant of Circus Knie in Lausanne. 1964), bullfights (Cow fights in Evolène, 1974, Com_C10-153-004), tourist postcards, and public monuments (On the Gotthard, 1949, Ans_15315-095-AL-FL). These images shift the animal’s role from medical subject to cultural figure: a symbol of wildness, national identity, or colonial exoticism. Yet here too, a logic of control and containment persists.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings on disciplinary institutions, we explored how the zoo—like the lab or the museum—functions as an engine of visibility and capture, enclosing animals within fixed regimes of meaning[2].
The third act focused on taxidermy and natural history exhibitions, particularly those shaped by colonial ideologies. Through archival images and cinematic stills—such as those from the making of Barry of the Great St. Bernard —we examined how animal bodies are staged, aestheticized, and moralized. Donna Haraway’s seminal essay Teddy Bear Patriarchy offered a critical lens through which to read these displays, revealing how taxidermy and dioramas serve not as neutral representations of nature, but as technologies of ideological fantasy[3]. Haraway describes dioramas as “meaning-machines,” where animals are frozen at the moment of human conquest, and where the illusion of unmediated reality masks the violence, labor, and staging behind the scene (Taxidermist. 1982, Com_M31-0107-0003-0001).
Photography itself becomes complicit in this process[4]. The camera, like the needle or the pin, holds the animal still—fixing it in place, both physically and symbolically. In doing so, it aligns with a broader epistemic regime that seeks to preserve, control, and consume life by rendering it into image.
Finally, in our fourth and most contemplative encounter, we turned to photographs of living animals—those who look back at the camera, and by extension, at us (The curious in front of the cottage door, 1921, Ans_05328-01-033-AL; Cow, 1947, Ans_15865-038; Switzerland, agriculture, 1982, Com_Ex-BA02-0019-0096; Test in the monkey house and various zoo animals, 1956, Com_L05-0100-0002; USA, Yellowstone National Park, Antelopes near Northern Entrance, 1926, Dia_282-0425; Braunvieh, 1978–2001, Dia_288-2891). These are not just records of observation, but moments of encounter. What happens when we meet the gaze of another species? Is it recognition? Alienation? A shared vulnerability? Here, we asked participants to pause, to sit with the unease and the possibility of mutual regard. In these images, the boundaries between observer and observed begin to blur. The animal is no longer only an object of knowledge, but a subject capable of gazing back—perhaps questioning, perhaps resisting, perhaps simply witnessing.
Rather than offering closure, this final moment opens into uncertainty. What do animals see when they look at us? What histories do they carry in their gaze? And what responsibilities arise from the act of being seen? What is the power of the gaze?
Throughout the tour, we tried to unsettle established narratives around nonhumans as passive figures within human histories of science, entertainment, and domination. Instead, we approached the archive as a site of tension—between visibility and erasure, knowledge and power, intimacy and objectification. By engaging with photographs from ETH Bildarchiv as more than mere documents, we sought to reimagine them as provocations: tools for thinking otherwise about our shared entanglements with non-human life.
CRISTINA MALERBA is a curator and art researcher. She is currently pursuing a postgraduate degree in Cultural Critique and Curatorial Studies at ZHdK, Zurich, after completing a BA in Visual Arts at NABA, Milan. She curated the group exhibition Pianerottolo in collaboration with the collective SPECIFIC at BiM, Milan. She has worked as an assistant at Galleria Martina Simeti and at Archivio Turi Simeti, where she contributed to exhibition-making and archival practices. Her curatorial interests focus on critical mediation and collective research, particularly within visual art history and archival contexts.
[1] Christman, Jared: “The Gilgamesh Complex: The Quest for Death Transcendence and the Killing of Animals.” Society & Animals, 2008: 16 (1): 15–34.
[2] Franke, Anselm: “Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls, or the Sudden Disorganization of Boundaries.” In Animism, edited by Anselm Franke, 14–43. Antwerp: Extra City; Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.
[3] Haraway, Donna: “Bear in the Teddy Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936.” In The Haraway Reader, 151–181. New York: Routledge, 2004.
[4] Susan Sontag: On Photography. New York: Delta, 1977, 15.