Monstrorum historia
Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera, both renowned Catalan photographers, began their collaboration in 1984 with a catalogue of nonexistent plants. Their aim was to question the long-established cliché of the truthfulness of the photographic document. Following this initial collaboration, they went on to explore the often ill-defined limits between reality and fiction. In 1985, they began working on the Fauna project, a large-format installation of multiple elements around the figure of a forgotten scientist and his discoveries in the animal world.
The starting point is the supposed discovery by the two photographers of the lost archives of the German zoologist Peter Ameisenhaufen and his assistant Hans von Kubert. Fauna features photographs of the animals inventoried by the zoologist, the scientist’s working notes, X-rays and dissections of skeletons. All the key elements are there to give scientific credibility and epistemological weight to a total fiction. When the installation was shown for the first time in 1989 at the Zoology Museum of Barcelona, a survey carried out by its Education Department revealed that 27% of visitors with university degrees believed the animals were authentic.
Images of the work
MACBA Collection
The MACBA Collection focuses on the art of the period spanning the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Without ignoring the specificity of any moment, it centres on what the notion of artistic contemporaneity and its multiplicity of languages has meant during the last decades.
