No animals appear in Alina Bliumis’s latest series, Zoo Paintings; it is the viewers themselves who are caged. The watercolor paintings render fictional, paradisiacal landscapes of lavish greenery, palms and rubra flowers soaking in soft light on wood panels framed with steel redolent of prison bars, cages, and fences. Contrasting idyllic scenes of nature with the apparatus of confinement and exclusion with which human beings “zoo ourselves,” Bliumis calls attention to the state of alienation in which we live.
The series subtitle gestures to the island of Nauru, nicknamed by a British sailor, in the eighteenth century, “Pleasant Island.” The island’s unpleasant history mirrors the global problems at stake in these paintings: European phosphate companies mined the island throughout the twentieth century, leaving behind, as National Geographic photographer Rosamond Dobson Rhone wrote in 1921, “a dismal, ghastly tract of land, with its thousands of upstanding white coral pinnacles”; 800 million metric tons of phosphate later, Nauru has lost 80% of its original vegetation. Since 2001, it has housed detention centers for migrants seek- ing asylum in Australia, which have been the target of numerous complaints of human rights abuse.
In this context, fences, borders, and cell walls take on new meaning, literal and figurative. These physical divisions signify own- ership, rather than stewardship, of land. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that our political communities are arranged on the premise of such divisions: “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land,” he wrote, “said ‘This is mine,’ and found peo- ple naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.” Now, some estimate the total length of fences in the world is ten times that of roads.
The colonial process, which entailed the widespread exploitation and destruction of the natural world, imposed this logic of division and extraction—in Nauru, yes, but also around the globe. Today, the migrant detention facilities on the island are but one nexus of a worldwide network of prisons and cages for migrants struggling to cross human-made borders. From Greece to the Netherlands, the United States to Lithuania, migrants are interned in prison-like facilities. These borders for which we fight, we war, we die are as imaginary as the natural landscapes Bliumis conjures behind steel bars.
As migrant detention facilities borders or warehouses for the socially marginalized, prisons have their origin—at least in part—in Belarus, where the artist was born. Jeremy Bentham found inspiration for his panopticon design while on a visit to his brother, an employee of Prince Potempkin of the apocryphal “Potempkin Village.” Legend has it staged an elaborate scheme to produce the illusion of wealth in his village to fool Catherine the Great, setting up painted façades like a set in a play to stage the peasants’ prosperity. The story of Potempkin Village offers a useful metaphor for the elaborate contemporary ruse of fences and prisons concealing widespread poverty from view.
In their less sinister, everyday iterations, fences assume a decorative aspect. Lining gardens and beaches, they prettily sepa- rate people from nature. In so doing they embody and aestheticize our alienation from our environment: the zoos we build for ourselves.
Zoo Paintings invites the viewer to consider the false borders imposed between humans and the environment, and between po- litical communities. Nauru provides a microcosm for the intricate overlap between these two trends—ecological devastation on the one hand, border violence on the other. Through these renditions of paradise and the harsh metal bars zoo-ing the viewer from our landscape, the series gestures to a possibility: What if we tore the fences down?
