Where Do Animals Go When They Die? Animal Ghost as Multispecies Epistemology in Performance

The disappearance of animals (Filippi 2017), conceived as the removal of non-human bodies from spaces, contexts, imaginaries and relationships, coincides with the appearance of the Animal in society through products or symbolic images, material or immaterial. As places of literal and ontological extermination of livestock, slaughterhouses are confined outside the cities, so that the ob-scene animals' bodies and narratives remain invisible and unknown to the public domain (Arcari 2020; Colling 2020). Similarly, though in another guise, the commercialization of pets ensures a re-composition of the Animal within the domestic space as a pacifying figure starting from the anthropomorphization of the same (Reese 2023). In late capitalism, the reality of animals, ousted from the common imagination, is thus re-proposed as shared symbolic fetishes (Shukin 2009) in advertising, literature, the arts, as well as in safaris, zoos, circuses. In these spaces, animals, naturalized, become romantic representations that have little to do with the materiality of their lives and deaths (Timeto 2020). The proposal intends to fit into this context through an elaboration of the animal specter (Shukin 2009), examining the resonance that this string figure has in performance art. In particular, the focus here is on performances capable of politically moving the question of non-human animals’ disappearance, with the desire to reintroduce them in public life, this time starting from their irreducible materiality. Indeed, the spectacles chosen to conduct this investigation do not thematize animals as specters, but choose animal hauntology as a posture, as an ecological modus operandi. For this reason, the formats, dramaturgies and aesthetics of two particular works, L’ebbrezza distruttiva di una scimmia cappuccina [The destructive drunkenness of a capuchin monkey] (2020) by Jacopo Giacomoni and La notte è il mio giorno preferito [The night is my favorite day] (2019) by Annamaria Ajmone, resonate as haunted in themselves; the performers do not try to bring to light (visibly or narratively) a lost Animal, but they assume its spectral presence as always reformulating political demands, in a performative sense of the term (Caleo 2020). Hence, by embodying the opacity of animals’ bodiless bodies, assemblages of transits, apparitions and contaminations open up a creative imagination of a new multispecies politics. Thanks to these works, the survival of the animal continues karstically as a more-than-human knowledge which is irreducible to a universalization of the Animal, but to the specificity and materiality of animals’ lives instead (Gruen 2015). However, the animal specter should not be understood as an immaterial presence that depoliticizes the potential of a feminist materiality; instead, it is a field of forces capable of shifting theatrical structures considered immovable, like the anthropocentric vision that still permeates theater, in the direction of liberation. Namely, it is a question of affirming a "paradoxical corporeality" (Shukin 2009) which is not subjected to the dynamics of zoobiopower in the arts (La Berge 2019), intended as the exploitation of non-human bodies for artistic productive reasons inside the deadly economy of Capitalism. This study then fits into the field of Performance Studies as an essential element for reflecting on the ecological and thought crisis in the Anthropocene starting from its remains (Tsing 2017). If in theater the subject is disappearance (Blau 1985), so it is in anti-speciesist theory; the point is not making fire visible again, or not, but at which costs and with which programs.