Between you and me: adjustments of thinking at the margins of culture

• Main Authors: Snaebjornsdottir, Bryndis, Wilson, Mark
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: 001 Knowledge; 570 Life sciences; 700 ARTS & RECREATION (collections; philosophy & education); Iceland
• Online Access: http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/1310/; http://www.genna.gender.uu.se/FileManager/CONFERENCE%20REPORT%20-%20MAM.pdf

The third paper turned once again to visual arts, in which Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir explored the complicated and duplicitous relationships to animals in contemporary western culture in her paper ‘Between you and me: Adjustments of thinking at the margins of culture’. Based upon her own visual practice, specifically a project relating to human attitudes towards seals in a remote part of north Iceland, the research focuses upon a video of the seal swimming in an estuary, overlaid by the voice of a young farmer discussing his reappraisal of his relationship with the land in order to meet different demands for consumption and a growing environmental consciousness. The animal is apparently oblivious to the human observer as the camera oscillates between the hiding place and the perennially scrutinized animal. The research investigates the multiplicities of human attitudes towards animals through a series of interviews with people who have had contact with the seal in variety of ways, for example hunting, consuming, caring and observing, in an attempt to separate the many representations of the animal from the ‘living’ animal.