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“Man gave names to all the animals”, Bob Dylan reminds us in a song, with an eye on the Bible. Giving a name, in occidental Christian culture, means dominating, exercising paternal authority, owning, deciding fate. Man names animals because they are different and inferior, and decides about their life, their possible usefulness and their death.

But beyond physical dominance – which also happens between animals – an even more significant and much more complex way in which man takes possession of animals and of everything else in the world, whether from nature or from culture, is the activity of classification, which is immediately linked to those of conservation and the making of museums: these activities have been, and remain, the tools and institutions of the human aptitude to dominate the world.

A important book by Georges Perec, entitled Penser/classer, offers a critical and subtly ironic interpretation of the problem – practically impossible for the human mind to resolve – of comprehending the world (in the etymological sense of taking, possessing – but also in the sense of finding a meaning for things and for existence itself) through categories to permit logical, all-inclusive and, in the end, reassuring order. Perec’s writing reveals, step by step, how the operation of classification is simply a disconcerting work of fiction conducted by man through imagination, creative construction, always open, incomplete, and always subject to discussion. Strong and structured, yet weak at the same time.

Natural History, uses the spaces of a small museum of Natural History as a setting for a grouping of fictional accounts that unfold on various levels. On the one hand, there is the fiction that is always staged by a museum of this type, through small, sometimes naïve or clumsy, but always fascinating depictions, arrangements, compositions, the use of display cases, dioramas, artificial spaces.

On the other, there is the instance of minimal scenes that happen inside the museum, of objects that somehow appear there, though they may seem extraneous and out of place. On another level, there is the fiction generated by the photograph itself, also through reflections, overlaps and, of course, cropping and the choice of vantage points. So a goat that certainly knows many things gazes at us from inside the photo with its little eyes, seeming to have entered the world only to be photographed and to look at us. But if we raise our gaze we notice that a bottle of wine and some glasses have been mysteriously placed on top of her display case.

A dog – a living one – sits on the checked floor and curiously observes many stuffed owls in a display, individuals and couples. We are tempted to say that the owls are also curiously observing the dog, wondering what it is doing there in the museum.