THE
ANIMAL
TURN

2026-01-31

Saskia Michels

(1) La Visitation, photograph, 100x150cm, 2011, artist’s collection
(2) Art Orienté Objet, May the Horse Live in Me, 2011. Photo: Miha Fras

(1) Laure Limongi © Nuti-Molajoli
(2) View of the performance by Art Orienté Objet, May the Horse Live in Me, Ljubljana, 2011

THE
ANIMAL
TURN

2026-01-31

Saskia Michels

On February 22, 2011, at the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the public witnessed the 90-minute performance Que le cheval vive en moi (May the Horse Live in Me) by the French bio-art duo Art Orienté Objet. The work represents a scientific feat: the xenotransfusion of equine blood into a human. Within a scenography blurring the lines between hospital infrastructure and biological laboratory, Benoît Mangin injected Marion Laval-Jeantet with a horse-blood serum. As the confluence of bloodlines took place within the artist's body, prospective diagrams of this cellular reaction—produced by a research team from the University of Poitiers—were broadcast to the audience, rendering visible an event otherwise concealed by flesh.

(1) La Visitation, photograph, 100x150cm, 2011, artist’s collection
(2) Art Orienté Objet, May the Horse Live in Me, 2011. Photo: Miha Fras

Crystallizing twenty years of research into interspecies communication and ethics, this performance is far from a transhumanist endeavor aimed at transcending human limits while perpetuating animal exploitation. Instead, the artists seek to align their corporeality with that of the equine to grasp its mode of being-in-the-world and attempt a relational encounter. To this end, Marion Laval-Jeantet dons leg prostheses that raise her to the horse's height, constraining her movements to an equine gait as she interacts with the animal. The performance concludes with the extraction and freeze-drying of a small quantity of this "centaur" blood, transmuting both the act of venipuncture and its byproduct into art objects.

This performance challenges the humanist conception of alterity—which posits "the animal" in absolute opposition to the human—by transforming the millennial topos of hybridity into a lived reality. Here, hybridization is a sensitive, empathic undertaking and an exploration of a more-than-human experience. Drawing on the posthumanist definition popularized by Justyna Stepien, "more-than-human" denotes the entanglement of the human and non-human, acknowledging the non-human already latent within the human, and vice versa. Achieving their fusion is an intensification of this inherent blend, rather than a rejection of a singular, primal "nature."

The successful execution of the event—without the death of the artist-subject or major medical complications—coupled with scientific advances in xenotransplantation, adds a new dimension to futuristic projections of hybridity as a potential horizon for the human species. This is a subject previously explored in contemporary art by figures such as Kate Clark and Patricia Piccinini.

Laure Limongi seizes upon this potentiality in her latest work of speculative fiction, L’invention de la mer (Le Tripode, 2025). Framed as a fictional manuscript written in 2123 by a cephalopod chimera (a "genetically reconstituted human") named Violetta Benedetti-Ogundipe, the book has traveled through space and time via a mycelial channel to reach today's humans. While Violetta demonstrates the new literary, linguistic, and poetic forms birthed through hybridization, she also warns of the consequences of our lifestyles on our own survival and that of other living beings. The actual author constructs a more-than-human possibility where humanity immerses itself deeper into other species with each passing generation. In this future, the non-genetically entangled human form is obsolete, having been abandoned for the sake of survival.

The book's structure necessitates navigating multiple narrators and temporalities—from Gina de Galène, a cetacean chimera, to her sperm whale ancestor Moanaura (who lived between the 1940s and 1980s), and Ménippe Zahlé, a crab chimera—as it weaves their writings with epigraphs by Violetta. These varied contexts allow the author to shift her locus of enunciation, experimenting with perspectives outside the human. Much like Art Orienté Objet, Laure Limongi attempts to understand non-human animals, conveying this experience through a unique lexicon and the invention of a new creative mode: olfactory poems. Such a form inevitably invokes the theory of zoopoetics.

THE ANIMAL TURN

Laure Limongi seizes upon this potentiality in her latest work of speculative fiction, L’invention de la mer (Le Tripode, 2025). Framed as a fictional manuscript written in 2123 by a cephalopod chimera (a "genetically reconstituted human") named Violetta Benedetti-Ogundipe, the book has traveled through space and time via a mycelial channel to reach today's humans. While Violetta demonstrates the new literary, linguistic, and poetic forms birthed through hybridization, she also warns of the consequences of our lifestyles on our own survival and that of other living beings. The actual author constructs a more-than-human possibility where humanity immerses itself deeper into other species with each passing generation. In this future, the non-genetically entangled human form is obsolete, having been abandoned for the sake of survival.

The book's structure necessitates navigating multiple narrators and temporalities—from Gina de Galène, a cetacean chimera, to her sperm whale ancestor Moanaura (who lived between the 1940s and 1980s), and Ménippe Zahlé, a crab chimera—as it weaves their writings with epigraphs by Violetta. These varied contexts allow the author to shift her locus of enunciation, experimenting with perspectives outside the human. Much like Art Orienté Objet, Laure Limongi attempts to understand non-human animals, conveying this experience through a unique lexicon and the invention of a new creative mode: olfactory poems. Such a form inevitably invokes the theory of zoopoetics.

Laure Limongi seizes upon this potentiality in her latest work of speculative fiction, L’invention de la mer (Le Tripode, 2025). Framed as a fictional manuscript written in 2123 by a cephalopod chimera (a "genetically reconstituted human") named Violetta Benedetti-Ogundipe, the book has traveled through space and time via a mycelial channel to reach today's humans. While Violetta demonstrates the new literary, linguistic, and poetic forms birthed through hybridization, she also warns of the consequences of our lifestyles on our own survival and that of other living beings. The actual author constructs a more-than-human possibility where humanity immerses itself deeper into other species with each passing generation. In this future, the non-genetically entangled human form is obsolete, having been abandoned for the sake of survival.

The book's structure necessitates navigating multiple narrators and temporalities—from Gina de Galène, a cetacean chimera, to her sperm whale ancestor Moanaura (who lived between the 1940s and 1980s), and Ménippe Zahlé, a crab chimera—as it weaves their writings with epigraphs by Violetta. These varied contexts allow the author to shift her locus of enunciation, experimenting with perspectives outside the human. Much like Art Orienté Objet, Laure Limongi attempts to understand non-human animals, conveying this experience through a unique lexicon and the invention of a new creative mode: olfactory poems. Such a form inevitably invokes the theory of zoopoetics.

(1) La Visitation, photograph, 100x150cm, 2011, artist’s collection
(2) Art Orienté Objet, May the Horse Live in Me, 2011. Photo: Miha Fras

Zoopoetics is an ecopoetic approach to literature, emerging from the environmental humanities, which studies the plurality of stylistic, linguistic, and narrative means used to render the diversity of animal affects, feelings, and behaviors, as well as the plurality of their "worlds" (Umwelten). Its progenitor, Anne Simon, notes that the novel is the prime site for its development, as "it allows language to actualize itself through an incredible diversity of perspectives" via the author's capacity for narrativized projection and empathy. A substitution of perspective occurs, wherein "creative language allows one, if not to shed one's skin, at least to neighbor and intersect with" non-human animals.

In this book, where substitution operates in both structure and form, the characters’ voices denounce animal exploitation and suffering. Limongi invokes concepts of sentience, animal culture, and animal consciousness, expanding upon them through epigraphs and footnotes. In both these works, hybridity serves as the vehicle for exploring the lived experience of non-human animals. Though distinct in form, both testify to a growing trend toward the erosion of anthropocentrism in contemporary production, driven by ethical and ecological concerns. The ultimate expression of the rejection of humanity in contemporary creation is found in the concept of the "anthropofuge" developed by Thomas Schlesser—a term that remains, however, inapplicable to these two works, as the human is never entirely excluded.

(1) Laure Limongi © Nuti-Molajoli
(2) View of the performance by Art Orienté Objet, May the Horse Live in Me, Ljubljana, 2011

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BONNIN, Anne, CARON, Natacha, CUSIN-BERCHE, Chantal (et al.), Art Orienté Objet 1991-2002, Montreuil: éditions CQFD, 2003.

BOURTASIS, Sofia, DUMAS, Stéphane, HAUSER, Jens (et al.), Art Orienté Objet 2001-2011, Montreuil: éditions CQFD, 2012.

JEANNEROD, Aude, LERAY, Morgane, SECARDIN, Olivier, and SIMON, Anne. "'Animality runs right through the human.' Interview with Anne Simon," RELIEF – Revue électronique de littérature française, no. 18, 2024, pp. 27-43.

LIMONGI, Laure, L’invention de la mer [The Invention of the Sea], Paris: Le Tripode, 2025.

PIRSON, Chloé (ed.), Art Orienté Objet: Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin, (Exh. cat., Paris: Musée de la chasse et de la nature, Oct 22, 2013 – March 2, 2014), Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2013.

Radio Campus Grenoble, "Apérophonie: Laure Limongi – L’invention de la Mer" [Radio broadcast audio archive], uploaded April 8, 2025 by Clarcli Honegger, [URL], accessed January 24, 2026.

RAMADE, Bénédicte, and UHL, Magali. "From the Animal Point of View" [Online symposium audio archive], The Animal and the Human: Representing and Questioning Interspecies Relationships, Montreal: Carrefour des arts et des sciences, Université de Montréal, April 12, 2018, [URL], accessed January 28, 2026.

SCHLESSER, Thomas, L’Univers sans l’homme – les arts contre l’anthropocentrisme (1755-2016) [The Universe Without Man: Art Against Anthropocentrism], Paris: Hazan, 2016.

SIMON, Anne, "Zoopoetics, an Emerging Approach: The Case of the Novel," Revue des Sciences Humaine, no. 328, Oct–Dec 2017, pp. 71-89.

STEPIEN, Justyna, Posthuman and Nonhuman Entanglements in Contemporary Art and the Body, London: Routledge, 2022.

TAÏBI, Nadia, "What is Zoopoetics?", Sens-Dessous, no. 16, 2015, pp. 115-124.