Do you like cat videos? Try watching a thousand in a row, spread them on a timeline, and map out the similarities and differences between them. This experiment could serve as a primer for the work of two-person art collective NEOZOON, whose preoccupation is human-animal relationality. Using only found footage and social media archives, the duo aims to expose the oppressive power structures that position humans as exceptional, and non-human animals as anything but. 

Collage is the preferred artistic tool and method. Ever since Fur Coat Recycling (2009-2012), where they cut pelt into animal shapes and glued it to facades in many European cities, NEOZOON’s interventionist approach aims to switch contexts. “To take something out of one context and bring it into a new one,” says Michaela, one of the two members. While their early street art used cut-out techniques to, in a way, inscribe non-human animals into the urban geography (Bah Bah Black Sheep, Le Goût des Bêtes), the prominence of social media archives in their current work speaks to a new kind of cohabitation of species. What academics term ‘human-animal geography’ relates to their spatial entanglements, but the digital geographies proposed by NEOZOON are no less illuminating. “If there is a change concerning animals in the digital age, that would be a new kind of visibility. In turn, humans have started to think about pain and patterns of power in a new way,” says Friederike. 

In his essay “Why Look at Animals?”, art theorist John Berger details how, with the advent of Modernity, animals disappear from the public space. As machines take over and words like productivity or capital gain traction, animals are forcefully marginalised into the zoo. Nowadays, every screen is a portal to animals, and animal videos make up a huge chunk of our social media consumption. Can it be that the Internet is the mega-zoo of today? 

According to Michaela, both the urban and digital public spaces are very restricted: “Some animals are, of course, missing from the urban space, because there is always a categorising mechanism at play: humans have to bring order and structure things.” Friederike, in turn, jumps in, “I keep thinking about how possible it is for animals to get real visibility in the digital space—I think there’s a change happening, for better or worse. It could be a positive thing, like if people think twice about what they eat, but it could also make someone buy a pet because of an online trend. In urban spaces and before YouTube, it wasn’t possible to get an impression of animals all over the world. ”

NEOZOON makes animals visible while avoiding the traps of metaphor and allegory by actively grappling with the web of entanglements between humans and animals. The collective’s name comes from the Greek term for a non-native animal species, introduced to an otherwise foreign environment through human activity. This human factor has been central to the collective’s work since its first projects in 2009, always aware of our all too anthropocentric perspectives. A perfect example here is the 2017 short Love Goes Through the Stomach [available to watch via Kortfilm.be], which combines ASMR, “eatcasting” and Let’s Play videos from YouTube, to lay bare many of the contradictions fuelling Western society’s nutrition habits. Humans, too, are a product of capitalism, even when they seem to worship their consumer goods (meat and dairy in their supermarket hauls) in front of the camera. 

NEOZOON’s work also offers a meeting place for biopolitics and religion. Little Lower Than the Angels (2019) presents the creationist myth in Christianity (that God created humans in His image) through instances of peak dogmatism, from historical iconography to YouTube Evangelists. It is a striking compilation of clips revealing how little has changed over time when it comes to humans’ divine claim to power and superiority, and how ossified that idea is. The short’s spiritual successor, Biting the Dust (2021), exposes a certain cognitive dissonance in Christian dogma when it comes to the ‘right’ of some living beings and pets to go to heaven. 2022’s Lake of Fire relates the words of fanatic religious preachers to images of the Anthropocene, addressing the absurdity of such dogmatism in the face of an impending climate catastrophe. 

There’s a misconception that all activist art wags a finger at the viewer and in some way disciplines them into ‘being better’, but NEOZOON’s works absorb—or should we say, recycle—some of their source material’s entertainment value. Their found-footage videos highlight the absurdity and harm inherent in normalised overconsumption and are, according to Michaela, the collective’s “way of dealing with the strange behaviours we see in our society, to uncover something [for others] by shifting the context and pointing out what doesn’t work.” If there is a pedagogical element to their art, it is not in any way didactic. NEOZOON serves its critique with uncompromising sharpness, honesty, and humour, admitting to using humour as an invitation and  “a way to open doors, instead of closing them, before people have the chance to think about what they just saw.” Testament to this is the collective’s bold use of music to match the rhythmic editing, splicing together the clips in every film. Percussions often feature in the lively, playful scores without overpowering the original audio track for maximum authenticity and minimum (but meaningful) intervention. 

The duo works exclusively with found footage, an ecological decision that saves them and the planet’s resources, but gleaning material from every corner of the Internet sounds like an always incomplete mission. It’s no surprise, then, to hear Friederike admit that “it all happens in the editing,” while acknowledging that entails a lot of trial and error to find the perfect fit for each film. When asked whether a specific kind of discipline allows them to view the more disturbing images one can encounter online in a more detached manner, they both stress the importance of the process and what their films are conveying. “In my mind, I’m thinking about what I can do with this image, not how disturbing it is,” adds Friederike, “and there are things that one of us can’t watch while the other can, but if we spot animal cruelty, we flag it immediately.” 

Humans are, according to NEOZOON, the most aggressive animal out there, exemplified by their cut-out public installation Big Game Hunter (2011), which taped true-to-size print-out images of hunters and their animal prey as trophies on the streets of Paris. Throughout their artistic career, the collective frames humans as an integral part of a structure of oppression: capitalism enslaves people, and people subjugate animals—as pets, meat, leather, byproducts. One solution—and one readily taken up by so-called abolitionists—would be to just erase the human perspective out of disdain for the pain humankind has already caused both animals and the planet as a whole. Yet, NEOZOON continuously chooses to interrogate that role instead of disregarding it. Is there a hint of optimism there, a hope that resonates through the critique? Perhaps.

“I don't know if we can make it, but we are trying! The stories we’ve shared for so long have been about the bad history of mankind. So there must be some way out of this disaster. Maybe.”