Rescue to animality: challenging cosmophobia through contemporary art

Abstract

This article proposes animality as an artistic strategy for engagement, opposing cosmophobia, a concept formulated by Antônio Bispo dos Santos to describe the fear of nature resulting from colonization. The study is grounded in the reflections on perspectivism by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and in the multispecies and tentacular thinking by Donna Haraway. It proposes an analysis based on the figure of animals in the works of artists Jaider Esbell, Jonathas Andrade, Graciela Iturbide, and Denilson Baniwa. It concludes that animality in art functions as a technology of approximation that allows humans to re-establish a lost intimacy with the world, inhabiting reality in a tentacular, organic, and counter-colonial manner.