Modern Animal

In the age of autofiction and its attendant narcissism, the young, Berlin-based Yevgenia Belorusets is a point of relief. Her work, grounded in years as a photo-journalist, is exuberant rather than premeditated. It brings together the stories of many to form its identity.MODERN ANIMAL knots together humans and animals, retelling interviews, folktales, memories, and visions of the people--bourgeois, urban, rural, Roma, working class--encountered on a five-year journey through Ukraine. A lecture format, following the Soviet style, disintegrates; as, at times, do logic and language. The product is a revolutionary approach to anthropology, what it means to become and behave like something else.Without judgement or simplification, Belorusets provides intimate revelations of human-animal relationships: how we shape each other, use each other, and, at times, cross the lines that distinguish us from one another. In conversation, she finds the lost and forgotten remains of something pagan, but still irrepressibly modern.