An Amer­i­can soci­ol­o­gist and urban plan­ner, Mark Gott­di­ener says he begins his visit to each new city at the ZOO, which serves as a reference to the model of a given soci­ety, as well as its urban and cul­tural strate­gies. ZOOs are urban oases, het­ero­topias sharply con­trast­ing with the rest of the urban fabric. Nature is here exactly as one wants to imag­ine her: serene, pas­toral, excit­ing, and avail­able. Strolling among the wild ani­mals one trans­gresses cli­mate zones, restored envi­ron­ments, con­ti­nents, and times: a lion is adja­cent to an ante­lope, the black swan wan­ders near a pink flamingo, an Aus­tralian steppe sits next to a bird sanc­tu­ary. This peace­ful and utopian cohab­i­ta­tion of exotic species, like in Noah’s ark—the zoo vis­i­tor takes on the role of this bib­li­cal char­ac­ter—, poses ques­tions about the his­tory and sig­nif­i­cance of the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of animals.

ZOOs were cre­ated in the mid-​nineteenth cen­tury, in par­al­lel with shop­ping arcades and muse­ums, and are derived from the menageries and col­lec­tions of exotic crea­tures at the royal courts. Accord­ing to the direc­tive of the Euro­pean com­mu­nity, today’s ZOOs are “establishments where ani­mals of wild species are kept for exhi­bi­tion to the public for seven or more days a year.” The project in the zoo during the Warsaw Under Con­struc­tion fes­ti­val by Museum of Modern Art is a series of micro-​intervention in the land­scape of the zoo­log­i­cal gar­dens in Warsaw, as a dynamic image of and reflec­tion of human cul­ture and self-​awareness. The neolib­eral model of cul­ture, with its leisurely con­sump­tion of beau­ti­ful, safe and exotic nature, at the same time makes us aware of our ambiva­lent atti­tude towards ani­mals. A critical look at the zoo as a paradigmatically human prod­uct raises ques­tions about the onto­log­i­cal status and the limits of our respon­si­bil­ity, the age old dis­tinc­tion between cul­ture and nature, the devel­op­ment of bio­cap­i­tal­ism and posthu­man­ist thought, and polit­i­cal ecol­ogy. Animal stud­ies has been for past decade devel­op­ing an inter­species argu­ment, in which a man is sit­u­ated besides ani­mals, machines, and cyborgs as one of the equiv­a­lent com­po­nents of the greater eco-​system. A series of inter­ven­tions by artists, sci­en­tists, and anthro­pol­o­gists will raise ques­tions about the nature of our per­spec­tive on what is 'non-​human', the cul­tural, social, sci­en­tific, and per­for­ma­tive cli­mate of our still anthro­pocen­tric thought. Not only does the human gaze upon the animal, putting it in its proper place (in a ZOO, for exam­ple), but the animal also gazes back at man, some­times with star­tling effects. Jacques Der­rida encoun­ter­ing the sight of a cat or Witold Gom­brow­icz a cow, felt alien­ated in their nat­ural envi­ron­ment, sud­denly aware of them­selves being a “strange, unau­tho­rized animal.”