A thing about natural history, animal skins and art –a review of Giovanni Aloi’s Speculative Taxidermy

The purpose of this review is to familiarize the Polish reader with the extensive and interesting monography: Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene, published by Columbia University Press. The Author Giovanni Aloi –art historian and museumologist, takes up the challenge of opening new fields, and asking new questions in research on taxidermy in art and science. The speculative methodological approach proposed by the author, draws on the new materialism, archology of knowledge and “speculative turn,”and enables him not only to thoroughly analyze the art involving taxidermic objects, but also to conduct erudite analyzes of discourses, practices and “nexuses”defining complex human-animal relationships. Taxidermy is a pretext to reflect on the sources of animal representation in contemporary culture and discourse of natural history, as well as to show the abovementioned relationships in the context of ecological, economic and environmental crises, and the uncertainties characterizing the “dark ecology”of the Anthropocene. This work is an extremely valuable contribution to Ecocritical studies and the still developing field of animal studies.

The purpose of this review is to familiarize the Polish reader with the extensive and interesting monography: Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene, published by Columbia University Press. The Author Giovanni Aloi –art historian and museumologist, takes up the challenge of opening new fields, and asking new questions in research on taxidermy in art and science. The speculative methodological approach proposed by the author, draws on the new materialism, archology of knowledge and “speculative turn,”and enables him not only to thoroughly analyze the art involving taxidermic objects, but also to conduct erudite analyzes of discourses, practices and “nexuses”defining complex human-animal relationships. Taxidermy is a pretext to reflect on the sources of animal representation in contemporary culture and discourse of natural history, as well as to show the abovementioned relationships in the context of ecological, economic and environmental crises, and the uncertainties characterizing the “dark ecology”of the Anthropocene. This work is an extremely valuable contribution to Ecocritical studies and the still developing field of animal studies.