Abstract
As Australian thinker Deborah Bird Rose has noted in her portrait of human-animal encounters titled “Cosmopolitics: The Kiss Of Life” (2012), in the twentieth-one century the human-animal boundary has become a site of extreme contestation in the realm of ecological thought. Moving in the direction of these encounter stories, in this paper I give an animalist interpretation of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) works and life to explore alternative and intercultural relationships to nonhuman beings. To illustrate this point, I will analyze Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, Fulang-Chang and I (1937) and Self-Portrait with Small Monkey (1945) comparing them with Alexandre-François Desportes Self-Portrait in Hunting Dress (ca. 1699) a paradigmatic self-portrait from the animalier tradition. Through this analysis, I will examine how Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits suggest a bondedtogether composition based on her links to the nahualism common in Mexico’s countryside. This study aims to exemplify how modern arts can be an effective way in which non-conventional artists contribute to ecological thought by shaping intercultural and alternative visions of animals.
