Exchanging Glances

Emma Nilsson, curator

Animals look at you. You see yourself being watched by the serene glimpse of an elegant gazelle, how a rhinoceros turns to you briskly, the unhurried glance of a gnu touches you, and again, the peaceful giraffe, from her height surveying the enti- re savannah... you are almost ignored by a brooding chimp, but instead you meet the amazed glimpse of a cheetah, and a lion's strangely benevolent demeanour. And yet, there's a lioness, she seems friendly, scrutinising you with true curiosity, but then you meet her again, tense in ambush, always impo- sing and majestic.

Many among Alberto Bernardoni's black and white photo- graphs, taken over a span of almost 30 years during which he travelled widely across the African continent, appear as if the animal were consciously aware of the camera and virtually posed in front of it. The surrounding landscape often recedes into the background and is rather able to pick up the nume- rous nuances of the animal's grey tones or even to continue the drawing of the fur beyond the animal. Who is disguising whom, we may ask. In other photographs, the sharp contrast of the landscape virtually turns it into a background canvas in a photo studio and the animal itself into a silhouette. Always, in every circumstance, the entire picture belongs to the por- trayed animal.

As much as these pictures tempt us to anthropomorphise the wild beasts according to our wishes and desires, the traditio- nal cultures of African spiritualities convey us that all animals harbour a soul. There were – maybe there are – good souls and evil souls, sacred as well as profane souls. The rivers and their sources were also consecrated, and mountains were nearly brushing gods. Thus nature, animal and man, gushed from a sole creative energy, were melted together in the epi- phany of a same reality. This intelligence of the world promi- ses: man and animal are neighbours.

We know only too well what happened in the aftermath. Man raised himself to be king and created subjects as well as slaves, animals were no more killed in order to maintain nature's balance, but profit was taken from the neighbour as well as from nature. And to this day, colonialism' ashes are still glowing.

By contrast Eden – man's sweet dream of a wonderful and ful- filling paradise... Perhaps this tantalizing thread spins through the entire evolution of mankind. Since paleoanthropology, in turn, assumes that the origins of Homo Sapiens and the origins of culture lie on the African continent, the image of the vast and little touched continent as the Garden of Eden develops. An ideal in which something pure as well as beauty can be

experienced. An ideal in which the sublime can be glimpsed and the effect of the violence of the primordial can take hold of one's own body. Life and death forever entangled.
The harmony, the wild, the danger, the beauty, the pleasure, the diversity, the foreign – the other. The quest for the Other is always a search for or even a promise of the unusual, nou- rished by the ever recurrent ambivalence of awareness and concealment.

In his book Zara's Tales, a gift to his infant daughter Zara, the photographer Peter Beard (a friend of Alberto Bernardoni) who has spent a large part of his life in Africa and has left unmistakable photographs of the world there, comments on precisely this tension between projection and reality of the Other, "nothing out of the ordinary happens. It's just Africa, after all"1. Everything that seems so uncommon to foreigners, is simply ordinary in Africa.

Eden – in this book it complies with a memory. The memory of Alberto Bernardoni's numerous journeys across the large continent, with his special gaze on a possibly ideal nature, but nevertheless in that 'other' world with its amazing and wild animals. And: the animals look back.

What exactly happens in this magical instant, frozen by the camera and propelled to its own eternity? As if lost in a game

of mirrors, we see the Other while he looks at us, and we look at ourselves as we look at this encounter.
Perhaps the paradisiacal lies precisely in this exchange of glances, in the possibility of catching a glimpse of the world of the so Other for a brief moment. But perhaps the para- disiacal also lies in the turmoil overwhelming us when we are observed by our via-à-vis? For what does he perceive in us, beyond danger or a possible prey? A soul? What does the Other know about us while observing us? About a good soul? The explosion of self-reflection may trigger precisely this exciting and certainly never to be resolved moment of confrontation or rather contact with oneself. But perhaps the paradisiacal also lies in the memory itself of those encounters with the extraordinary ordinary. However we understand and respond to it for ourselves, the exchange of glances with our neighbour, the animal, can open up something very funda- mental. In Jacques Derrida's words: "The animal approaches us, he observes us. In front of him, we stand naked. And there, possibly, thinking begins."2

1 Peter Beard: Zara's Tales. Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa, New York 2004

2 Jacques Derrida: The Animal That Therefore I Am, New York 2008 (Original: L'animal que donc je suis, Paris 1999)