Produced as part of The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation’s 2014 Grants and Commissions Program 

(If you are in Miami the originals will be shown in Cifo Art Space (1018 North Miami Avenue) from Sept 5 to Nov 2, 2014

This Beastiary project is based on the idea that once upon a time, before the advent of photography, video and Google Earth, most people got to know about the world through written descriptions. Those that pertained the animal world, where found in beastiaries and natural histories (eg:most europeans in the middle ages had never seen an elephant, for example, but some might have read about them in such texts). The idea is to simulate the experience of such a world (a world made of words). To do so, a researcher has been extracting animal descriptions from specific historical sources, she has then edited those text fragments so that the names of the animals are deleted; and, finally, she has given those descriptions to me. I then draw them based solely on the descriptions, whithout any previous knowledge about the beasts. It might be worth noting that those sources make no distinction between normal and mythological beings. This first selection is of American animals as described by European explorers of th XVI and XVII centuries.