What if animals remember what we've forgotten—including that we, too, are animals?

Seven artists have responded to our call with works that position animals not merely as subjects of representation, but as active archives—carriers of evolutionary memory, witnesses to environmental transformation, and participants in systems of knowledge that challenge human-centered ways of seeing. In wild//archives, we encounter creatures who hold histories in their bodies, their behaviors, their presence and absence in landscapes both natural and digital, and we attempt to see through their perspective. These works reveal that when we look at animals, we are always also looking at ourselves—at the systems we've built, the relationships we've distorted, and the kinships we might still reimagine.

Symbiosis and Survival

Linda Mitchell's mixed media work Synergy immediately establishes the collection's central tension: the inseparability of predator and prey, violence and beauty, death and life. The piece "explores the duality of the animal world," melding hyena and zebra into a single layered composition that "symbolize[s] the synergy of their co-existence." Through acrylic and graphite on fragmented surfaces, Mitchell creates an archaeology of interdependence. The creatures don't simply coexist—they constitute each other, their survival written into the same material substrate. This is the animal archive at its most fundamental: the evolutionary record of bodies shaped by and shaping each other across millennia.

Lucia Adise's Lo mejor de los dos mundos, 2025 extends this logic of coexistence into the aquatic realm. The work “celebrates the coexistence between two parallel worlds.” In Adise's underwater scene, where cartoon clownfish swim alongside a submerged human skull, "the dichotomy transforms into dialogue, parallel universes that enrich rather than annul each other. The work proposes that human and animal archives are not separate records but "a harmonic unity, rich, unique, and in constant expansion.”

Digital Distortions

Milena Kourtidou's painting Parasocial Ownership confronts the most contemporary form of human-animal archive: the digital. Against a backdrop of Twitter logos, a suburban house becomes the site where "the digitalization of anything natural including animals" reaches its most troubling expression. Kourtidou articulates what she terms "parasocial ownership"—"the intimate relationship humans show they have with animals on social media while in reality they even tend to neglect their own pets."

The work catalogs a litany of digital-age abuses: animals placed in dangerous situations for "rescue" videos, ridiculed and abused for likes, purchased irresponsibly because a species was "trending." The heavily saturated colors and sharp, defined forms create what the artist describes as an artificial impression "mimicking the impression of a screen," making the work "balance between analog and digital." In this space, animals become content, their wildness flattened into engagement metrics, their archive reduced to viral moments that obscure rather than reveal their actual lives.

Intimate Entanglements

Several artists explore the closer, more ambiguous relationships between human and animal, where affection and projection become impossible to separate. Hayam Elsayed's Whispered Companions presents a young woman with a squirrel perched atop her head in a dreamlike forest setting. The painting's soft, storybook quality suggests fairy tale logic—animals as companions, confidants, extensions of human consciousness. Yet the squirrel's precise naturalistic rendering against the girl's stylized features creates tension: whose story is being told? What whispers pass between species, and what gets lost in translation?

Darcy Whent's ink and watercolor work Goodest Girl makes this tension explicit. "The figure of the dog is more than a pet or companion — she is both mirror and measure," the artist explains. "Rendered in sharp, flowing ink, she stands in quiet judgement, part comfort, part reminder of how roles of care and expectation fold into love." The dog becomes "a kind of moral compass, one that we impose upon ourselves and each other," carrying "the impossible stretch to always be the 'goodest.'"

Whent identifies "the tension between affection and obligation," where "warmth in the loyalty" exists alongside "a weight in the standards we carry." The choice of ink on paper creates what the artist calls "poised fragility: deep blacks that command attention, fine lines that tremble with nuance." In this delicate balance, the work explores "identity, self-worth, the relational architecture between human and animal, child and caregiver"—revealing how thoroughly our relationships with animals archive our own emotional economies, our systems of reward and disappointment, our impossible standards of devotion.

Gesture and Absence

Alina O'Dwyer's White Horse offers perhaps the collection's most purely gestural approach to animal archive. The abstract horse, rendered in loose, vibrant strokes of pink, blue, yellow, and white against grey, refuses photographic documentation in favor of something more elemental—the energy of the creature, the movement, the life force that resists containment. Without an artist statement, the work speaks through its materiality alone: paint as flesh, brushstroke as muscle, color as pure vitality. The horse becomes archive not through realistic detail but through the traces of its presence in the artist's hand, the memory of movement translated into paint.

Interspecies Futures

Jenny Marketou's sculptural installation Folly for Songs for Funk Kinships presents the collection's most radical proposition: art as habitat, the artwork as living archive actively shaped by its non-human inhabitants. Built from "colorful soils, adobe bricks, cob, lime and sand," the biomorphic structures—"one dome and two elaborate totems with lattices and chambers"—are "designed to host birds, insects, turtles, cats and other living organisms" in Athens' Concert Hall garden.

Inspired by "botany, entomology, the American philosopher Donna Haraway, the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and his research on animal architecture and the biogenic structures like bird nests, beehives and termite mounds," Marketou's practice is "not only informed by the natural world but actively engage[s] with it." The artist is explicit about her intentions: "I am less concerned with aesthetics or utility than with creating the conditions for life to unfold."

The work "unfolds as a shelter for wild kinships and sonic convergences, attuned to the transformations of vegetation and climate." Crucially, "the sculptures remain open to weathering and change, responsive to the micro-movements of the environment." Here, the archive is not fixed but evolving, shaped as much by its animal inhabitants as by the artist. Marketou recognizes "that the agency of what I shape through my sculptures will ultimately be determined by the natural ecosystem beyond my control."

This approach represents what the artist calls "sculpture as a form of ecological repair," creating not "functional objects" but "tools for observation and frameworks geared towards interspecies collaborations and kinships beyond humans." The work "inscribes itself within the garden and stages the conditions for a new ecosystem of relations: a meeting ground between animate and inanimate, where life, matter, and care are reimagined with the agency of the multi species."

Archives of Becoming

What emerges across these seven works is not a singular vision of animal archives, but a complex negotiation of how non-human creatures hold, transmit, and embody knowledge that humans can only partially access. From Mitchell's intertwined predator and prey to Marketou's living sculptures shaped by their animal inhabitants, these artists reveal that animal archives are never static. They are dynamic, relational, constantly being written and rewritten through ecological pressures, evolutionary time, digital technologies, and the intimate entanglements of care and projection.

The works also reveal uncomfortable truths about human relationships with animals. Kourtidou's parasocial ownership and Whent's impossible standards of devotion expose how thoroughly we project our own needs, anxieties, and systems of value onto creatures who exist in fundamentally different registers of being. Elsayed's fairy-tale intimacy and Adise's parallel worlds suggest the persistent human desire to bridge the unbridgeable—to believe that animals can be companions in ways that transcend the vast differences in how we experience reality.

Yet there is also hope in these works—hope located precisely in the artists' willingness to acknowledge what they cannot control, cannot fully know, cannot capture. O'Dewer's gestural abstraction admits the limits of representation. Marketou's living sculptures surrender authorship to the natural ecosystem. Mitchell's layered synergy recognizes that predator and prey are not opposites but constitutive relationships. Adise's expanding unity proposes dialogue over domination.

What Animals Remember

In bringing these works together, wild//archives proposes that animals archive not just their own experiences, but ours as well. They hold records of our environmental devastation in their changing migration patterns and shrinking habitats. They archive our emotional needs in the roles we assign them—companion, pest, symbol, content. They carry our evolutionary history in their bodies, reminding us that we too are animals, that our archives are also written in flesh and behavior and the slow accumulation of adaptive responses.

But perhaps most importantly, animals archive the possibility of knowledge systems entirely outside human comprehension. The bird building its nest according to patterns inherited across generations. The whale navigating by song across ocean basins. The insect responding to chemical signals invisible to human perception. These are archives that exist regardless of whether humans document them, archives that will continue after our own records have turned to dust.

Animals remember what we choose to forget. But they also remember what we can never know—and in that unknowability lies both the limit of our archives and the beginning of genuine multispecies kinship.

Featured artists: Linda Mitchell, Lucia Adise, Milena Kourtidou, Hayam Elsayed, Darcy Whent, Alina O'Dwyer, Jenny Marketou