I am reflecting on the travel journal of Shay Zilberman. In Latin, Itinerarium, a word that has evolved into the prosaic English term itinerary, a travel plan, like those that land in our email inbox after booking a flight. In the opening essay of the book, Rotem Rozental speaks about the tradition of writing travel journals like this, since ancient Rome—mapping the world in words and later in visual descriptions. Zilberman’s collages record the world, bringing its components together.
Sometimes they do so through encounter (a white light from a torch carried by marchers meets white light falling on a forehead in profile, the curved outline of a square becomes the curved outline of a breast); sometimes through exchange (snake skin falls onto the forehead of a mask, a coat rack is caught in the ribcage captured by an X-ray). It is impossible to separate these elements: a saw, gymnasts, a shell, earth, the texture of wood, of a basketball; fur.
Things that were once used to classify—scales of measurement, biological taxonomy, division into states of matter—are no longer valid, and these paper-works stubbornly refuse to employ the interplay between them for amusement. Among the series included in the book are those in black and white and those in color. Some of the items are carefully cut out, and some are torn. There are landscapes in them. They have faces.
In the middle of the book, there is a series titled “Handwriting,” in which Zilberman’s works seem to subdue the layers of paper into something else: a collection of creatures, there is no other word, complexly composed of parts, emerging from the darkness of the page. In one, the head of an oryx whose neck twists into the curled trunk of an elephant, both emerging from the upturned body of a sea lion.
In another, shells are piled one on top of another, deceptively three-dimensional at the border between black and white, forming the torso of a penguin. An armadillo’s shell curves into a giant loop through the hump of a camel. Words like "through," "beneath," "on top of" become very confusing here. Things happen simultaneously, at once, and in the same place.
"My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange!" Ovid writes at the opening of his Metamorphoses. In Zilberman’s works, the raw material of paper and books is transformed and transfigured, through scissors, into creatures whose form is “till then unknown,” as Ovid described the newly created human.
In his depiction of the flood, Ovid writes for us, from the depths of Rome’s Pax Romana—its Golden Age—of a space where sea and land dwell together in upheaval: a dolphin wanders through a forest, a sheep and a tiger are swept away by waves, a kid and a sea lion coexist. This mixed space is not utopian but chaotic, a space from which possibility is born. Like in Ovid’s flood, the creatures before us offer an existence that is as unsettling as it is exhilarating—a possible existence of constant change and daring transformation.
In this, they resemble another hybrid creature, a close relative: "The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence," Donna Haraway writes in her foundational Cyborg Manifesto from 1985. In this text—itself a hybrid of academic writing, political reading, and an asymptotic striving toward the mythical—Haraway seeks to think about the then-current age through the figure of the cyborg. The cyborg here is defined as "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction [...] creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted."
Haraway’s writing, reaching out its hands (and tails and antennas) in every direction, has left a profound mark on the humanities' reflections on technology and the boundaries of the human in the almost four decades since its publication. But less attention has been given to a significant thread of thought in Haraway’s manifesto, presents no less than her examination of the friction and interaction between humans and machines: the interface, the membrane constantly breached, between humans and animals. "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras..." Haraway writes, referring to the monsters of Greek mythology, with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake, "theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs."
In other words, even before Haraway turns to the technological cyborg, to the machine, she speaks of the animalistic cyborg. At the end of the twentieth century, she claims, "nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation."
And long before the twentieth century, there is a myth: "The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling."
Two of the delightful couplings in the Handwriting series appear in Zilberman’s new exhibition, Thresholds, at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University. Alongside them are new hybrids, pushing the works even further beyond the boundaries of coherent creatures, toward totemic jewels interwoven and fused together. Mammals, invertebrates, arthropods, birds, and reptiles undergo a soaring and ambitious metamorphosis into material-spirit objects. The totem, an Indigenous American word originally linked to the heart, is commonly, sometimes carelessly, used to mean a sacred entity.
But more than that, the totem has become a lightning rod for thought in the twentieth century. Through this concept, religion and spirituality intertwine with mental and sexual life, and together they meet in the attempt to reach the root of human culture, which from its beginning has repeatedly grappled with the imaginary boundaries between human and animal, between the human and the non-human.
If, in the mid-1980s, Haraway revealed to us that we have always already been cyborgs, dwelling in the intersection of body, technology, and economy, the present moment towards the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century returns us precisely to her chimeras, both animal and mythical. For example, the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin, who, after being attacked/kissed by a bear in Siberia, was transformed, according to the indigenous people among whom she did fieldwork, into a Medka—half-human, half-bear.
Rarely do natural history museums invite us to encounter the imaginary, as they do when the blackness of one’s pupil is swallowed into the black of Zilberman’s paper. Natural history museums, after all, are not concerned with the invented. They deal with what is found, what is revealed, what is cataloged. And yet, in their own way, they themselves exist in the twilight zone between the living and the dead. On the one hand, they do not present us with a living, breathing parade like zoos, which throughout history have been a space of violence against others, both animals and humans from far-off lands alike.
On the other hand, natural history museums are far more organized and scientific than the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, in which religious objects, works of art, taxidermy, and samples from the natural world were displayed in dizzying disorder. Between these wild realms, each in its own way, the natural history museum exists as a space capable of casting a cataloging human gaze upon the natural world. Opposite this gaze, the creatures before us, displayed in a natural history museum, refuse classification.
The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv.
From the walls, the natural world casts its own gaze upon us, and it is a gaze so different from the one familiar to us, the human gaze. The creatures emerging from the black space do not demand that we worship them nor do they position themselves as deities. Instead, they seem to ask to live alongside us and within us, to plant in us the desire to live in other bodies, to be called to threshold spaces, to be created as new faces on the earth.
The exhibition Thresholds will open on 25.11.2024 at 7:30pm, at the The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv.
Zohar Elmakias is a writer and anthropologist. Her first book, Terminal, was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press in 2020. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Institute, as well as a fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.
