A family of nineteen Pan troglodytes are huddled in various configurations. Multi-male, multi-female, cross-generational bodies fill the display. There is action. I witness both horror and affection from these relatives – a mix of social tensions and agreements. Pairs of chimps raise their arms and lock hands in a ceremony of cleaning one another: duets of tender and delicate intimacy. I become a voyeur. I watch a baby chimp move across the family network in cheeky reverie, as its elders effortlessly manage the youngster’s tactility. It climbs all over the group, touching everything with boundless play. Its curious energy expands to the homosapien gaze.
The older chimps turn their backs to us; a turning away from spectacle where an endless herd of weekenders swipe monkey faces across their mucky screens. On the side of my DNA pool, youngsters crouch on the floor mirroring their furrier cousins – they tap on the hard slime between one genetic soup and another. Here the transparent divide dissolves into an uncanny reflection where the aggressive demands of our young human hominids confuse the anthropocentric gaze. I hear grandmother Haraways words: “There is no Eden under glass”; a refraction takes place and a cultural perversion reveals its head.
The 1953 French film essay Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) explores the French colonial effects on the way African art is perceived by the West. It states, “when human beings die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botanic death is what we call culture.” These Pan troglodytes are neither the remembered dead or the stolen objects of African antiquity, and yet here they are in a place resembling a museum or a Pierre Huyghe installation where 1000 living trees are placed inside the Sydney Opera House. This is what the film calls “the place where we send objects to die.” In this case, this place is where we conserve the fragments of a fragile animal kingdom – sponsored by Hungry Jacks. A Zoo. The idea of a conserved animal is paralleled to the film’s “dead object” something taken from its original habitat or original significance and becomes reduced to a museum object or exhibit. A living obituary.