Animal Architectures

Technical abilities have been long used as a means of drawing a defining line between animals and humans. Anthropocentrism has over centuries portrayed animals as passive beings unaware of their surroundings, incapable of building, and unable to produce any gestures transcending mere functionalism. Thus, unfavorably positioned, animals have been always configured as lacking in comparison to the complexity and sophistication of humans.
Thus far, many art historians have implicitly endorsed the Cartesian case for human superiority through a deliberate bypassing of new ethological and scientific evidence. Amongst these, Laurie Schneider Adams has argued that art and architecture constitute the essential discriminating factors between human and non-human relational abilities to their surroundings.

In her introduction to 'The Methodologies of Art', Schneider Adams wrote that:
Animals build only in nature, and their buildings are determined by nature. These include birds’ nests, beehives, anthills, and beaver dams. Mollusks, from the lowliest snail to the complex chambered nautilus, build their houses around their own bodies and carry them wherever they go. Spiders weave webs, and caterpillars spin cocoons. But such constructions are genetically programmed by the species that make them, and do not express individual and cultural ideas.

This issue of 'Antennae' is determined to subvert this approach by presenting evidence of animals as active agents producing structures, forms, and aesthetics that can be understood to challenge the anthropocentric views still pervading scholarly thinking. In a 360 degree approach that has thus far characterized 'Antennae'’s enquiries into many problematic human-animal relationships, this issue will piece together a range of different views, fragmented perspectives, and alternative interpretations of animals’ abilities to build/structure/weave/arrange...

Academic essays = length 6000-10000 words
(Please submit a 350 words abstract in the first instance)

Artists’ portfolio = 5/6 images along with 1000 words max statement/commentary

Interviews = maximum length 8000 words

Fiction = maximum length 8000 words

Email submissions: antennaeprojectgmail.com

www.antennae.org.uk