please open hurry
Silver twigs; a grid of brightly-coloured squares displayed across a huge, hinged cabinet; audio-visual tracks featuring insects and apes; a documentary film; sculpted hands; a dance performance. Together these make up the exhibition please open hurry by United Kingdom-based artist Amalia Pica.
While the silver twigs are pretty and the colourful squares have the bright appeal of Matisse collages or pages from Dick Bruna, the various elements appear so disjointed and impenetrable, you get the feeling there is a missing link. Thankfully, the exhibits’ labels serve to unravel the code: everything is an artefact of academic research into animal behaviour and cognition.
Those coloured squares? Ideograms developed by researchers at Emory University for keyboard communication by apes. And the silver twigs? Sticks modified by chimpanzees to grub for food, recast in precious metal. The capacities demonstrated by these works matter because language and technological innovation are two of the litmus tests—among others are evidence of episodic memory and theory of mind—that mark out our difference from other animals. But the most potent of these has always been language. There are representations of humans communicating with animals in all cultures. In Western mythology, for example, a longing for it appears in the figure of Orpheus, who is the archetype of the greatest artist and who could communicate with the ‘beasts’.
The title please open hurry is a quotation from animal-to-human communication. It is one of the many simple word sequences signed by the famous chimpanzee Washoe (1965-2007) after she was taught a form of language for the deaf by an academic couple in Nevada. Pica has sculpted hand gestures in gypsum in memory of her—although the hands represented are human