Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals
Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals
In collaboration with Animal Allegories the Center for Humans & Nature Press Digital is honored to present Future Fables as an ongoing digital story gallery highlighting a variety of text, audio, video, and artwork capturing the power of human and nature encounters and connections.
The off-kilter stories that make up the Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals collection are intended to open up new thresholds for considering how humans relate to the more-than-human species around us. These stories emerged alongside other projects where we were working with science museums, exploring ways to foster ecological literacy in adult audiences. Yet while interviewing scientists and fossicking in archives, we began spinning stories that were more fable than fact: expatriate lungfish looking for love in lonely hearts columns, a conversation between a naturalist and a platypus about colonial collection practices, historical news extracted from the bellies of fish specimens.
In addition to our own experimental stories, we met artists and storytellers with wonderfully unusual stories of human-animal entanglements: bats as a potent metaphor for living with autism or as an extended metaphor for parenting in climate emergencies.
The Center for Humans and Nature is the perfect home for these future fables, speculative histories, and unlikely visualizations. As our species adapts to frightening new ecological realities and fights to keep the future livable for all creatures, we hope these tales of animal entanglements will make you think or feel anew about the beings with whom we hope to continue sharing this planet.
—Zoë and Ceridwen (Animal Allegories)
More content coming soon!
Future Fables Story Series
Future Fables Story Snaps
“Curious Encounter: Palm Cockatoo x Laurence Pike”
by Zoë Sadokierski, Laurence Pike, Clemens Habicht, Christina Zdenek
This video is the first in a series of “encounters” between musicians and animals, conceived by Zoë Sadokierski for the Animal Allegories project. The series explores what it might mean to play “with” another species and how we might curate an encounter with a threatened species in a way that minimizes interference with vulnerable habitat.
“Exercises in Minor Ornithology: Listening to What We Cannot Know”
by Zoë Sadokierski, Christina Zdenek, Rob Heinsohn
Read about the ideas behind this project in “Exercises in Minor Ornithology: Listening to What We Cannot Know”: “Perhaps one aspect of taking seriously the lives of other animals is accepting that their creative expressions exist entirely outside our cultural frameworks, that their intentions remain fundamentally opaque to us. This opacity need not be a problem to be solved….”
“Captives”
by Zoë Sadokierski, Ceridwen Dovey
“Captives” is a silent paper-theatre film in which a platypus and a naturalist discuss colonial collection practices. “Our initial plan was to create an archival film using this footage and still photographs. But how to voice a platypus? How far is too far to anthropomorphise? We opted for a silent film, and rather than the actual footage, [we decided on] a more ‘hands-on’ presentation: a paper theatre performance of the original film script using photographs from the Burrell collection and from public domain natural history illustrations.”
“Upside Down People: Bats And Autism”
by Sara Kian Judge
“Upside Down People: Bats and Autism” is an audio story created and narrated by Sara Kian-Judge and curated by Animal Allegories for Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals project. The accompanying Flying-fox camp recording, sound collage, and original background music by Sara Kian-Judge; microbat call recordings by Stefan Nyman; sound effects provided by Soundtrap and Sara Kian-Judge; layering and alteration by Sara Kian-Judge.
“Leathery Little Saints”
by Fionn McCabe
Leathery Little Saints is about bats dropping out of trees, the raging fires of the Black Summer, and a trip with the kids to the local pool. It’s about Global Warming, Parenting, and our responsibility to our children, ourselves, and the future. Living in the end times is difficult, emotionally complicated, and oddly mundane.
Future Fables editors:
Collaborating as Animal Allegories, Zoë Sadokierski and Ceridwen Dovey craft experimental, visually surprising tales of animal entanglements. We know stories can’t save the world. But they can provide moments of respite, transporting us into an imaginative realm where future possibilities shimmer briefly into view. Zoë is a designer, creative producer and Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney School of Design. Ceridwen is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, and a filmmaker.
Center for Humans and Nature series editor:
Anja Claus is Senior Editor of Humans & Nature Press Digital.
This project was made possible by a 2022 International Engagement Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and the University of Technology Sydney School of Design, with thanks to Jenny Newell from the Australian Museum.
