Читать книгу On the Animal Trail - Baptiste Morizot - Страница 7

However, nothing could be more concrete, closer to the soil and to life itself than Baptiste Morizot’s project. It is, quite literally, the most down-to-earth proposition that you could imagine, a proposition which requires putting on a good pair of shoes and walking, but which mainly impels you to learn again how to stare at the ground, to look at the earth, to read the copses, the trodden grasses and the dark thickets, to scrutinize the mud where marks and pawprints leave their trace and the rocks where they don’t, to inspect tree trunks with bits of hair sticking to them, to scrutinize paths where droppings are plentiful in one place but not another. For this is how those we call animals, and who are mostly invisible to us, manifest their presence. Deliberately sometimes, or even without paying attention. Tracking things down, in other words, means learning to detect visible traces of the invisible or, to put it another way, it means transforming the invisible into presences.

As Jean-Christophe Bailly has remarked how, for a large number of animals, their innate way of inhabiting their territory, their ‘home’, consists in concealing themselves from sight – ‘for every animal, living means crossing through the visible while hiding within it.’¹ Many of us have experienced this: we can walk in the forest for hours on end and not sense the presence of animals, or even remain completely unaware of their existence. We can imagine that this world is uninhabited, believing ourselves alone. Yes – so long as we don’t pay any attention to the signs. But if we change the way we walk through different spaces, pay due attention to them and learn the rules that govern the traces, then we are on the trail of the invisible, we become readers of signs. Each trace testifies to a presence, to the sense that ‘someone has been here before’ – someone we can now get to know, without necessarily encountering them.