“Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager managing an imaginary menagerie”. It surely is a tongue-twister that is expected to put one’s pronunciation skills to the test. But what if we’d move beyond that test and ask what it could actually entail. What would it mean, to imagine that imaginary menagerie? For this show I decided to take on the role of the menagerie manager and I explored the inquisitive nature that underpins the phenomenon of menageries. I found there to be a kind of curiosity that moves along dichotomous lines of discovering versus defining, along lines of answering to a great longing for wonder versus the tendency to comply with a social regime that values objective knowledge as its greatest good. I imagined what it must be like to be able to immerse oneself in a world of wonder, surrounded by many questions waiting to be asked. What do these unfamiliar, exotic animals look like? What do they do? What is it they need? And what do they tell us?
Truth be told, the lack of knowledge and empathy have made menageries to be pretty dismals places in the past, and it seemed that no matter how much noise the animals may have made, the animals never really took part in the conversations about them. And certainly, it goes without saying that the innocence of curiosity appears to have been greatly affected by this lack of understanding. However, this does not mean that what lies at the core of it all, an innate fascination for the unknown, needs to be silenced.
With this in mind I decided to create my own set of curious collections in which animals meet and correspond, in which they may raise questions and where they hopefully establish new senses of wonder. Whereas menageries have, sometimes quite literally, framed their exotic discoveries, it was not my intent to solely capture things. Instead, with this collection of imaginary menageries I try to open up a conversation with these things, or rather- with these most unique and marvelous beings, and reaffirm curiosity as an incredibly powerful and wonderful means through which we can connect with and within the world.