In the expanses of our dreams, we need wings. Mammals, invertebrates, arthropods, birds, reptiles – all need aspiration and upward growth, and the possibility of becoming a spirit-matter object, a totem, an indigenous North American word whose meaning involves a connection to the heart. The totem, as a sacred entity, is a lightning rod of thought: it integrates religion, spirituality, mental and sexual life, and the attempt to reach the roots of human culture. It calls on us to rethink the imaginary boundaries between mankind and animals, between human and inhuman.
With the assistance of scissors, the raw materials of paper and books have become the animals before you: new, ever-changing creatures that refuse to be catalogued, fused together into a totem-jewel. From the walls, the wild world casts its gaze upon us, a gaze very different from the familiar, human one. The animals before us do not demand that we worship them as if they were gods. These creatures court, prey, reincarnate and incarnate in a new body. They seek to live beside and within us, to plant inside us their desire to inhabit other bodies, to be called to threshold spaces, to be created as new faces on the earth.
Zohar Elmakias