ABSTRACT
Ravens were thus specially tasked with complicating the lives of humans, who were themselves, it must be said, created as a menagerie for the amusement of the gods. For four months in 2007–2008, Paris’s Parc de la Villette housed a multimedia art exhibition entitled Beasts and Humans. Beasts and Humans was housed in the newly renovated “Grand Hall,” formerly a slaughterhouse, and the first image that visitors would see as they entered the hall was that of a long shot of a cow ruminating in a moving image by the experimental filmmaker Georges Rey. Vinciane Despret was one of four experts on the commission of this exhibition, and acted as scientific and cultural advisor, as well as author of the exhibits’ descriptions and eventual book, the eponymous Beasts and Humans. Metis deploys itself as an intelligence of traps and cunning; in the animal world, like in the human world, power relations are constantly distorted by its intervention.
