REMEMBER HUMANS_
The installation features a dialogue between two lo-tech displays, infused with dystopian humor. It confronts viewers with a speculative future where humanity has ceased to exist. The seemingly non-human voices respond with nothing more than a casual „LOL“—“laughing out loud“—at the very idea of human existence. Offering a post-human perspective, the work recalls humanity as little more than an amusing anecdote in Earth‘s history. In doing so, it challenges present-day audiences to consider the impact of their actions and the narrative they are shaping for the future.
DESCENDANTS
Performance | 20’00’’ | 2024
Concept, costumes and props: Benjamin Egger | With: Samira Abd'Rabbou, Julia Klokow, Sophia Danae Vorvila, Alex Ghandour and Benjamin Egger | Composition chants: Oscar Mario Echeverry | Costume support and assistance: Iris von Rohr | Production: The Performance Agency | Production assistant: Paelden Tamnyen | Realized at Bruderholz, Baselland as part of Basel Social Club 2024
In this performance, humans and dogs come together in a forest at dusk to celebrate the canine spirit through a shared ritual. The work commemorates the arrival of the dogs of K9O/US on Earth in a future where humanity has ceased to exist. At its heart lies a composition of chants performed by the ensemble—a poetic homage to the canine ethos. These chants celebrate values such as non-dominance, patience, and generosity, qualities intrinsic to dogs. The ritual underscores the triumph of these virtues over human tendencies toward greed, dominance, and unrestrained self-interest. The performance invites participants into a transformative experience, fostering empathy, patience, and a deeper sense of interconnectedness beyond the human.
INVASION OF THE FITTEST
Watercolor and charcoal | each 214 x 304 cm | 2023
The two large-format drawings, created with charcoal and watercolor, depict a dense network of plants, humans, and animals. At the center of each image, a fantastical creature underscores the mysterious richness of these interactions. In one, a web of beaver, deer, and cacti intertwines; in the other, a dog, chameleon, and octopus merge into one. A human hand intervenes in both compositions—its gesture tender yet potentially threatening. This ambivalence lies at the heart of the work, reflected in the contrast between the title Invasion of The Fittest and the soft pastel tones of the watercolor drawings. The drawings are composed of nine individual sheets, hung with slight spacing between them. This arrangement creates the effect of peering through a window into a magical world. The hands intervening in this world function, much like the traditional back figure, as a motif for identification, inviting the viewer to reflect on their relationship to this captivating network.
K9o/us
Performance | 12’ 00’’ | 2023 |
Concept and costumes: Benjamin Egger | With: Kaja, Gila, Inox, Ona and Isaac | Production assistant: Anna Bleuler | Caregivers performers: Doris Baumann, Marco Bögli and Niklas Kurze | As part of the performative boat ride ANOTHER MAP TO NEVADA by The Performance Agency
While the sounds of dogs panting interfere with the soundtrack playing on the boat, a searchlight scans the riverbank for its source. Suddenly, a pack of dogs in light-reflecting suits emerges from the bushes. Their luminous helmets glow in the twilight as they roam the riverside. For a brief moment, a futuristic world materializes. The dogs appear to come from another planet. The suits display neolithic dog depictions, referencing the crucial time in history when humans first settled with their canine allies around 15,000 years ago. It‘s unclear what their mission is—are they here to invade Earth, or are they visitors from the future, seeking to learn more about their past?
THE PACK
Curtain made out of used sportswear and black velour on the rear side | metallic eyelets | steel tube and mounting construction | 330 x 590cm | 2022
Concept and realisation: Benjamin Egger | Sewing assistance: Iris Rohr | Finish: Polsterei Halbneu | Mounting construction: Benjamin Egger and Urech Metallbau
Here’s the polished version of your text: Sportswear holds a specific significance within the queer community. The curtain, a massive patchwork of used sportswear, references this history. Titled THE PACK, it particularly represents one queer subculture: the Pupplayers. Pupplayers are men who dress and behave as dogs, wearing dog masks and color-coordinated sportswear. The sportswear is a key element of the Pupplayer’s dog identity, embodying the canine character alongside the matching mask. As a patchwork made from countless pieces of used sportswear, the curtain symbolizes the innumerable Pupplayers intertwined in their community. In this sense, it functions as a fragmentation and recomposition of bodies, similar to a carpet made from animal fur. At the same time, it forms a soft wall within the space—a protective and permeable barrier that embodies the pack. This "wall" represents the community as a space-building institution, where queerness can be fully expressed and lived.
SCREW IT. I'M GONNA START MY OWN PLANET
A participatory project in cooperation with the Schütze School, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and the Blickfelder Festival 22 | 2022
Concept: Benjamin Egger | With: Novak, Samuel, Fabio, Carl, Tenzin, Soha, Elisabeth, Emilia, Danika, Elea, Elis, Janelle, Kimey, Linus, Luca, Melik, Neva, Nicolas, Viola, Tosca, Ariel, Emilia, Erjon, Flurina, Jonas, Lara, Lenn, Loïc, Mai, Malin, Marwin, Konstantin Alea, Anik, Bjordi. Emiliano, Eyla, Jon, Nick, Nina, Paul, Ramazan, Sadie, Tashi | Project management: Tasnim Baghdadi, Cynthia Gavranic | Coordination: Silvia HIldebrand, Marcel Hörler | Teachers: Sabine Duarte, Christian Strupler | Documentation: Raphael Stucky
If current trends continue, many species—humans included—are facing the imminent loss of their habitats due to climate collapse. In response, a group of children from the Schütze School in Zurich has decided to take action. On a newly imagined planet, they are creating a fresh ecosystem with new creatures adapted to novel living conditions. Drawing inspiration from the animal kingdom, endemic species, dinosaurs, and speculative biology, they design and perform newly invented species while building models for the prototype of this new world at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst.
Start sniffing. Go on all fours. Follow a smell. Don’t talk. Growl when you cross someone’s way. Explore the smell.
Instruction for a fortune cookie, Making a scene, Kunsthal Gent, 2021
THE DOG IN ME
Lecture-Performance | 45‘ 00" | 2021
Text and concept: Benjamin Egger | With: David Attenberger | Costume design: Benjamin Egger, Fantastic Rubber & Florian Germann | Cat-pole: Benjamin Egger and Ortreport | Dramaturgical advice: Teresa Vittucci
In the lecture-performance The Dog in Me, a queer fetish cat delivers a provocative lecture on non-human animals. Somewhere between stand-up comedy, philosophical reflection, and animal rights activism, the lecture takes the audience on a journey to challenge the status quo. The sassy, ambiguous character portrayed by David Attenberger dares listeners to abandon their belief in human exceptionalism. Drawing inspiration from animal ethics, animal studies, and queer feminism, the cat seduces and mocks the audience simultaneously. Constantly returning to the example of the dog, the cat deconstructs the notion of dogs as mere allies of humankind. While acknowledging their intelligence, the cat also highlights how dogs have leveraged their alliance with humans, the most widespread and destructive of mammals. The performance explores the emotional and biological entanglement between humans and dogs, shaped by their co-evolution. It blurs the line between the two species, presenting dogs as human animals and humans as canine animals. In doing so, it scratches at the very foundation of the idea of the human as a self-contained, independent success story.
AND THEN WE TOUCH
Video, Colour | Dolby 5.1 | DCP | 13‘ 30" | 2021
Written and directed: Benjamin Egger | Pupplayers: Aslan & Noah | Cinematography: Andi Widmer | Sound recording and mix: Reto Stamm | Post production: Silvio Gerber | Off-Voice: Darcy Alexandra | Poem: Benjamin Egger | Title Design: Marlon Ilg
The viewer is drawn into an intimate scene between two pupplayers in a living room. The close-up cinematography captures the soft touches and playful gestures of two men dressed as dogs. AND THEN WE TOUCH confronts us with our own human needs for sensuality, touch, and playfulness. A shimmering space emerges when the human touches the non-human. Egger raises our awareness of the performative nature of categories like humanity and animality. In this cinematic essay, he explores the creation of a post-human identity, expressed through bodily gestures and grunts. Becoming animal does not represent a return to a so-called state of nature; rather, it is a hybrid process—deeply “impure”—in which bodies and artifacts merge.
My hand is touching your fur
Your teeth penetrate my skin
All this togetherness on earth
All these billions of interactions
There are waves, concentric circles
They interfere
Amongst us
And amongst our ancestors
Too
To us, Dears Magazine for tranversal writing practices, Issue 1, 2020
UNTITLED
Series of 24 Water Colours | Each 625 x 880 mm | 2020
The watercolor series Untitled depicts 24 different instances of a human hand touching a dog‘s head. Petting a dog can trigger a mutual release of the feel-good hormone oxytocin, which, from an evolutionary biology perspective, is essential for the development of emotional bonds—whether between mothers and their babies or between humans and dogs. At the same time, petting occurs without the dog’s consent. When observed closely, this common human behavior can appear ruthless. It is carried out with a casualness that would be considered intrusive if directed toward another person. In the touch of a dog‘s head, a millennia-old history of co-evolution unfolds, revealing a complex relationship of inequality, power, and love between humans and non-human animals.
MY BODY IS BECAUSE OF DOGS
Video | Colour | Stereo | HD | 14‘ 10" | 2020
Written and directed: Benjamin Egger | Cinematography: Benjamin Egger | Sound recording off-voice: Awah Kempf | Off-Voice: Teresa Vittucci | Text: Benjamin Egger
Benjamin Egger has spent days and nights with a pack of stray dogs in New Delhi, where, during the night, they reclaim the urban space as their own. The video captures the pack under the cover of darkness, accompanied by a voiceover that reflects on the evolutionary entanglement between dogs and human animals. Egger’s work raises questions about the influence of dogs on humans—not only in terms of social behavior but also biological development. Humans have lived alongside dogs for over 40,000 years. How has this long relationship shaped our self-conception? How essential is the bond between these two hyper-cooperative species? How much of the human animal is actually shaped by the dog?
DOGS
Pigment print on Epson Mat Superior | 841 x 1189 mm | 2019
DOGS explores the journeys of two different dogs: Cäcilie from Munich and Dinkus from New Delhi. Cäcilie is a pet dog, accompanying her human, while Dinkus is a stray, free to roam at any time. Surprisingly, Dinkus’s range of movement is much smaller than Cäcilie’s. The print of the overlaid GPS tracking data challenges the common understanding of freedom, serving as an illustrative example of the invasive behavior of humans, as documented through the tracking data of a dog that accompanies one of them.
INHERENT CROSSING
Artistic Research Project | 2012-2017
Concept and lead: Benjamin Egger | Mentoring: Prof. Dieter Maurer and Prof. Carel van Schaik | Cooperation: Institute for Contemporary Art Research of the University of the Arts Zurich, Anthroplogical Insitute of the University of Zurich and Walter Zoo Gossau
Do chimpanzees develop the self-motivation to use a paintbrush if they repeatedly are offered the opportunity to paint? Do they distinguish that handling a brush and paint is mutually related to the application of color and its visual effect? Is it ultimately possible to establish evidence of a pre-graphic or pictorial intention?
A transdisciplinary research team, composed of members of the Zurich University of the Art, the University of Zurich, and the Walter Zoo Gossau, explored these questions. Over the course of twenty months, the Inherent Crossing project offered a group of sixteen chimpanzees the opportunity to participate voluntarily in sessions during which they were able to occupy themselves with painting utensils. Of the sixteen chimpanzees in the group, five were regularly responsive to the offer. One of the female chimpanzees, Blacky, repeatedly indicated a pre-graphic intention in the way she handled the painting utensils. On multiple occasions, Blacky painted solid patches of color, juxtaposed paint applications, and displayed a differentiated treatment of the liquid paint as an imaging material.
For the question of pictorial intention, the actual process in dealing with the utensils is decisive: How are the brush and the gaze directed? Are their movements varied or repeated? Furthermore, however, the sessions in Walter Zoo made clear that the social and spatial conditions, as well as how fit each animal is on a given day, are essential for the animal to pay any attention at all to the brush, paint, and carrier surface. The setting of the sessions, the social constellations within the chimpanzee group, and the individual relationships between the given scientists and apes proved to be central elements in this process. Accordingly, the research team recorded not only the actual act of applying paint, but also the social factors prevalent during each session. Such an expanded focus is decisive for evaluating the study, as merely interpretating the traces of paint would be inadequate.
The study demonstrates, on the one hand, that the question of early graphic behavior among chimpanzees can be discussed only when the individual prerequisites of each chimpanzee are accounted for. It makes clear that a pre-graphic or pictorial intention may potentially be inherent in individual chimpanzees, but that pictorial interest is distinctly individual. On the other hand, it shows that the social parameters that enable a space of contemplation to emerge are of decisive relevance for the participation and development of pictorial processes.
