Travel with Wild Animals

“The eye exists in a savage state,” wrote Breton. We can also say that space and movement can exist – at least in part – in a savage state. For surrealism, savagery and civilization are not opposed: they complement each other. Wilderness is the foundation of the project of surrealist civilization. Likewise, the unconscious and its manifestations are the basis of surrealist lucidity.

In the surrealist tradition, the goal of walks and trips is not only to lose one’s bearings, it is also to find new ones, through encounters with lives or objects, discoveries, objective chances etc. The unconscious, the untamed part that is in us, is the guide to surrealist journeying. Measurable distance doesn’t really matter.

Encountering non-domesticated animals can help to discover and outline what, in us, also escapes domestication. When you are with a wild animal, space and movement change meaning, because this animal has a radically different conception of it than a human. This conception of course varies from species to species and from animal to animal. It can allow us to travel to different universes.

My character made it easy for me to come into contact with animals preserved from captivity and submission. I easily identify with these. When I am in their presence, when I undergo a reciprocal taming, it is not only their space-time that amazes me, it is also mine, because it has undergone a metamorphosis.

The moments I spent communicating with these rebellious animals seemed awe-inspiring. Here is the story of some of these adventures.

2015. Metamorphosis of a bull into a frog.

Childhood and metamorphoses

I was seduced, from the age of three, by little shiny and lively black lines which moved in the sea water. It was like strange writing, with identical signs that moved all the time.

The beach was particularly huge and deserted. It contained small ponds a few meters in diameter. These seemed to me to be my scale for playing. The sky drew marvelous spots within these pools. Frogs and tadpoles live in these spots. I felt like I was part of that world. It gave me both a sense of power and fragility. The tadpoles, the frogs and I were equal. We were wilderness, apart from nations, identities, hierarchies. I felt like I was very tall, with the desire to be very small, so that I could swim and have fun with these friends of mine.

In those puddles, the water was a bit muddy. The tadpoles hastened from one end to the other, circled around, moved away, came back. Their tails swished from left to right and right to left at high speed. They were very numerous. When I touched or hit the puddle, they did not change their dance: they were not afraid of the movements of the water.

I filled jars with seawater, seaweed, pebbles and tadpoles. I took these jars to my dormitory, under my iron bed, the mattress of which was so high I could sit under it. I gazed at the tadpoles and, in my imagination, I enlarged them by inventing oceans for them to inhabit. I fed them small white bits of breadcrumbs. When I returned to the beach, I would empty my jars in the ponds, thank my tadpoles and bring others back to the dormitory.

At that time I was able to observe their metamorphoses. The hind legs appeared first, then the front legs, and the tails stuck out. Then the frogs started to jump. I had never seen this before. I happened to pick up a little frog at my fingertips, in my hands, on my wet arms… Its skin was wet and soft. As I left this little life free to move off, it was not afraid.

An owl that opens the world

In my teenage years, I lived in a remote village on top of the mountains. Every night a large owl came to visit me. With tufts of feathers on her head, it looked like a big owl. I saw her settling on an olive branch, very close to my open window. The dim light in my room shone no further than this tree. My eyes were fixed on the very large fiery but still eyes of the owl. She was there for a very long time. Her eyes didn’t move and seemed to grow larger. She was staring at me in the same way that I was staring at her. Her head and body were also motionless. I wasn’t sure if she was looking at me alone or also looking into my room.

2016. Two half owls with beautiful knees.

She became for me the door to the outside world. She didn’t stand in my way, on the contrary, she hypnotized me and made me travel very far in my own imagination. She also seemed to command the air and the leaves that weren’t quivering. Once, she turned her head to look straight behind her, with incredible flexibility. There was a great emotional density between us, as if she were a close friend or a sister. I had never exchanged glances with anyone for so long, not even a small fraction of the time. It was as if I had become able to see two new suns. My room seemed to me to have become an astronomical observatory. Between our eyes stretched two hot, humid tubes. The moon kissed some leaves of the olive tree. It was like I was outside on a flying carpet. Under my feet stretched out the clouds, the continents, the seas.

On the ground there was a lizard. He actually lived in my room with multiple spiders of various species. He was watching me too, but he was a fan of speed. From astronomical telescopes, my eyes were transformed into all other optical devices. This lizard made me roam the room in all directions, into every nook and cranny. He would run on the walls and on the ceiling. He made the bedroom an entirely different space than a bedroom. A place that could be crossed everywhere like shooting stars.

Every morning, I left for my studio to go paint what these animals had inspired in me.

To wild dogs of all lands
I took part in a story with stray dogs. They take place in five episodes in different places, distant and with different dogs. They look like an enigmatic fable. The events here seem to accompany my unconscious feelings as old walls seem to draw fantastic frescoes. The facts that I am going to describe approach for me what surrealism calls objective chance.

2016. A flower for each at the tip of their tongue.

I lived with two untrained street dogs, they adopted me when I was a student. I was living in a very small house at the time, in a garden on a hill. A year later, I was forced to give the larger one, a wolfdog, to a couple of neighbors. When I visited them, I found out they had given him to a dog shelter. He died there. I was bitten by a feeling of guilt, the jaws of which didn’t want to loosen.

Two years later, I was sitting in the front of a car, near Göreme and its “fairy chimneys” in Cappadocia (Anatolia). The driver was going at high speed. We were on a dirt road. Suddenly, she was forced to brake suddenly, to avoid two stray dogs. I was seriously injured. I was sewn up with coarse stitches, without anesthesia. I was in a coma for a while. In the room I was taken to at Ankara Hospital, street dogs showed up at the same time every night. They screamed horribly. It seemed to me that these cries kept tearing my flesh apart, as the spirit of my dead dog fed my hallucinations. The hospital room was like a saucer of red blood.

Several years later, Thomas and I were walking at night in a forest on the Hautes Fagnes-Eifel plateau. Two dogs appeared in front of us and started barking. They leapt almost to my throat. Thomas and I each picked up a tree branch. At the level of terror I was in, the size, shape, texture, solidity of my staff played a major role in my perceptions. Distances were changing. Almost nonexistent in the directions where there was no danger, they were getting very dense where I saw them. My body was also changing, its essential organs were not the same and it was partially out of my control. For a moment, I lost my mind. I dreamed that the dogs were missing from this space, that they could not see me anymore, because I had come out of my body. They had taken my place, had become myself, while I howled like a dog. Accepting to put myself in a dog’s body freed me from the guilt I felt for my dead dog.

Finally, on the island of Prinkipo, a wild dog, similar to many others in Turkey, one day around five in the morning started to walk beside me, following me everywhere. I spoke to her and I sang to her. Suddenly, ten more feral dogs started barking to make us back away. I felt that the dog that accompanied me and I shared space like bread when we are very hungry or water when we are very thirsty.

1990. The feathered mother.

A feathered baby

In Paris, a couple of pigeons had built a nest, between the plants, in front of my daughter’s window. They rested on their egg, one after the other, for brooding. There was a baby. Each parent left, then came back, several times a day and fed it. For several days, I didn’t see either of them. I chewed bread, opened the little one’s beak. I swore that I would not watch a baby die in front of my house. One day the parents returned. From what other place?

Slugs and mischief

I witnessed the mating of two slugs on the edge of the stream that ran alongside Thomas’ house in Baronheid. These mollusks are almost all hermaphrodites. For a long time, I had felt very close to these animals, whose character I nevertheless did not share at all. I had also drawn many species of snails. The slug potentially possesses both sexes, but not quite simultaneously. Before my eyes, these animals took strange shapes and mingled. Their kinds of “penises” were made of two white mucous membranes. They resembled the peripheral female “labia majora”. These mucous membranes stuck together and moved extremely slowly. They rippled, stretched, stroked, curled, were slightly slimy, shiny, slippery. Their translucent cream was everywhere. Sperm entered through the genital opening on the right side of the head. Each formed an astonishingly long tentacle. The movements of the tentacles and the changes in the shapes of the two bodies were made with great harmony. Mating lasted about an hour. I felt my wet sex. It was as if my sex had come out of my body and come to life outside of me, while still imparting pleasure to me. As if my sex joined these slugs and learned to make love differently. I discovered regions of myself that were unknown, psychically distant.

2000. The Malice of the Slugs.

The little mollusks unraveled with extraordinary softness, and the tentacle of each had withdrawn from the orifice of the other. They fondled each other again after mating.

One of them was left alone next to me on a large sheet. I took it to Thomas. We gave it cucumber peels. It ate quickly, moisturizing the table with a secretion that I touched.

A bat after midnight

I lived on a canyon with a few poor buildings. One very hot night, a little after midnight, with the windows wide open, the somewhat humid summer air entered my home. I had just finished my last drypoint copperplate engraving. I was about to go to the press, to finish the job. Several of my prints were already hanging from a rope.

A large bat then entered, flying at full speed. It stopped very close to me. I adapted to its pace. I felt myself growing upwards. I opened my arms and ran, rocking from side to side. It followed me. I slowly climbed onto my bed. I watched it without moving. We were approaching each other. The walls vibrated.

The shadows of its mighty flight roamed the small space of the chamber. Its transparent wings appeared, like parchment skins, under the spotlight, like sails that were a little crumpled, and alive.

The almost empty space of the room had grown more intense. The ceiling and the entire top of the room were getting bigger. They were becoming more alive, more inhabited than the bottom.

I could see the muscle fibers and blood vessels in the wings of the bat. It braked and turned very fast. A whirlpool had entered the room and the room itself appeared as a whirlpool.

I stood with my arms wide open in front of these kinds of umbrellas transformed into flying machines. We danced together, as if in a trance. We had absolute control of the space.

The point of these stories?

It seems to me to suggest that living wild animals, easily accessible and unjustly neglected beauties, can make us travel – by their proximity and not by their exoticism – to parallel universes where time and space do not quite have quite the usual meanings and required behaviors.

One limitation of the experiences I have spoken of here resides in the status of “muses” that I attribute to these beings. They do not take conscious initiatives to initiate me into games, to manifest themselves as a creator.

This limit, which I set for myself, allowed me to take as heroes – for the majority of these brief accounts – species with ways of living very different from our own and whose intelligences of the world are not those of which it is typically customary to lavish with abundant praise.