Eva Koťátková, an artist with whom Meyer Riegger has been happily working together since her student days, is presenting the installation The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, curated by Hana Janečková, at the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. For the project, Koťátková is working together with the artists Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (Hylozoic/Desires), the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures as well as groups of children and older people.

In 2013, Koťátková already presented her work in the Biennale’s main pavilion. This year, she is returning to Venice with a theme that explores Czechoslovak history from ecological and decolonial perspectives, through the story of a real giraffe named Lenka.

Text by curator Hana Janečková:

Lenka the giraffe was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to Prague Zoo to become the very first Czechoslovak giraffe. She survived only two years in captivity, after which her body was donated to the National Museum in Prague where it was exhibited until 2000. In the museum’s taxidermy workshops, her insides were dissolved, to leave only her skin, and released into the public sewer system. The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, Koťátková’s collaborative project, reimagines Lenka’s story as a poetic, embodied encounter for the audience, invited collaborators and the artist, but also as a place of critical intervention in the relationship between institutions and the natural world.

The exhibition aims to question hierarchies, violence and extractive practices embedded in the way we encounter, view and learn about animals, suggesting different modes of engagement, where care, imagination and emotion are as important as historical narrative. The installation comprises multiple renderings of the giraffe’s body parts: cast 3D scans of Lenka in museum storage and a gigantic tunnel neck of the animal in the extreme vulnerability of sleep. In the soundscape the world of the free – a collaboration with the artists and composers Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (Hylozoic/Desires) – poetry is composed entirely from historical records of Lenka’s journey and accounts of her death and afterlife as a museological object. The giraffe, while eating acacia twigs, often damaged telegraph lines. Here, language itself is eaten into, and the messages that remain are those that tell a counter-story of repatriation and reparation. The low nocturnal hum of the sleeping animal is interspersed with subtle renditions of the national anthems of all the countries Lenka visited on her journey.

What is the difference between Lenka, the animal displayed in the zoo and Lenka, the museum object with glass eyes? Lenka also brings together recollections and stories, such as that of the top half of Wenceslas Square having to be, after the release of her body into the sewers, temporarily closed due to a peculiar smell. Interpreted by children, educators and older people who were Lenka’s contemporaries, the installation is conceived of as a collective body facilitating multiple forms of storytelling. Together with a contribution by the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, it sets a ground for decolonial pedagogy. This collaborative approach stages The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter as a place where belonging can be formed through emotional attachment and ecological relations instead of fixed notions of identity, borders and nation.