Catalogue text for Wrapped

Staffan Boije af Gennäs

Save the animals from the savannah

(about the problems of us being able to speak)

- Is it not beautiful, how to describe it - as far as the eye can reach, herd after herd of grazing animals superseding one another. The grandiose panorama is slowly transformed by the calm movements of animals on the wide spread feeding grounds. To the west the big round African sun is just on the verge of disappearing beneath the horizon - something in that direction I should think... like a taste of God's greatness.

- There, in all its nakedness, nature becomes so overwhelming giving the impression of something which you can enter into as a part of a greater rhythmical pulse...

You have had similar feelings before, in similar situations, and then, shortly afterwards, you've forgotten everything about the sensation that overwhelmed you. Your cynical vein tells you that it probably will be the same this time again.

But what does it matter now that you have been seduced by this entirety... and have had the feeling of disappearing into it.

- The effect that the landscape gave to you, came as an extra bonus. It was the animals that you came to see, their beautiful colours and graceful movements... everything out there in alteration between life and death. A vision that you imagined could confirm something for you.

- During the day the savannah seems so harmonic. The nights on the other hand are as close to hell as you can come on earth.

Now, as the sun has set, hell is beginning... as you sense the smell and hear the sounds of some bloodthirsty fiend that you know is hungry. And not just for one night, but night after night until you become the one in the herd slowest at making turns.

- It has been said that one can only hunt a deer or some similar European animal for about half an hour. After that the meat of the animal becomes watery and gets the flavour of adrenaline that is pumped into the blood system. If you shoot one that you have been hunting around for too long, it won't taste good for us humans to eat it.

Can you imagine how it would taste to eat a zebra after its having been chased around a whole night on the savannah by some predator...

- On the savannah there is no place for us humans, but as spectators. Therefore there is no place for your empathy either... maybe that is why you enjoyed your view so much all day. Because you were totally freed from any considerations other than keeping yourself outside of whatever was going on out there. And there is no space here for comparisons to our cultivated forests up north.

You came here to enjoy, nothing else. Your attempts at trying to live yourself into the life of a defenceless grass-eater out there, falls short... animals that you at the most know by name. The only thing that you have in common with them is that they eat, get kids and die. Sometimes they have crises, just like you, when they fall prey to some other beautiful animal.

It is not your backyard out there, where you can water your salad and watch it grow, plants you may understand and value almost as were they part of your family.

- The savannah is far too terrible a place for any creature like you to be able to live. The animals don't have such a bad time living in this hell, either they live or they die, and then there in no more to it.

Surely it hurts to become lion food, either way it is not a pain that will turn into any memory.

Whether the animal makes it or not, the pains eventually disappear. And all that has changed is that the poor animal has learned better how to avoid ending in similar situations.

- Now you have let in your empathy, something that you should have left out, allowing it to become a part of the scenery which is hidden from you anyway. With the sun down it should have no meaning.

All of a sudden you have a moral dilemma on your hands, and that is not what you came for... what does it serve, to begin to involve yourself in a situation out in nature. And now it is to late to let go. As if it was not enough with the worries you had to cope with in dealing with those animals which you have already domesticated.

- How is it possible to get out of this... if you placed a fence around the savannah and called it a zoological garden, all the cruel events that would be taking place in there would bring outcries. It would be seen as something very cruel by the public, and it would long since have been shut down.

- You see... now what will your next step be? - to install yourself as a hero of your fantasy... one who can dispatch all evil from the world.

- Now you see... you should have kept your romantic distance towards the grand panorama. Had it not become night, you would still have been standing in front of that view and felt that smallness towards nature. Now you are beginning to involve that which earlier was so beautiful, into your human analogies... you are not getting any joy out of it.

- Now you must find some consequence. What must it be then? If you are to hold on to romantic visions about nature out there and at the same time be able to believe in yourself as the responsible and civilised human that you insist on being, you must in some way save the animals from the savannah. Not from the place itself, but from everything which goes on out there.

- If you want to keep anything that reminds you of the savannah out there, you must put up a proper fence to separate the animals properly from one each other... and later on, to make life painless for all the involved, you must shoot zebra's here and there to give to the meat-eaters.

Staffan Boije af Gennäs, born 1966. Freelance writer. Lives and works in Copenhagen.

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