Book Description

Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, Appendix A-L (2020) is a publication by Bambitchell, the artist collaboration of Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Kyle Mitchell, conceived in relationship to their experimental essay film Bugs & Beasts Before the Law (2019) that explores the history and legacy of the animal trials that took place across medieval and early modern Europe and its colonies in the Americas. The film follows events in which nonhuman animals were put on trial in courts, where they were prosecuted for various crimes ranging from trespassing to murder, as well as the related legal practice of deodand, punishing inanimate objects faulted for human fatality. This publication functions as an appendix to Bambitchell's film, taking readers on a journey through the artists' research. It riffs on the appendix from the 1906 book that inspired Bambitchell's project, E. P. Evans's The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, the first chapter of which is the foundational English-language text on the medieval animal trials. Using collage and intertextual layering, Bambitchell probes the definitive authority of Evans's record, creating a counter-archive that unravels the fictive unity of historical narrative. This layered narrative in text and image is about power performed through the body of the other, revealing how authorities and institutions mediate social relations and subjecthood through such processes as the formation of property and the criminalization of sexual difference. Various perversions of justice across time and space reveal that the absurd logic of the animal trials is not an anachronistic anomaly but rather an adaptive force that continues to shape lives unevenly and to define the bounds of freedom. This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Fall 2020-Spring 2021. Texts include an introduction by curator of the exhibition Nina Bozicnik; the Bugs & Beasts film script; an excerpt from Greta LaFleur's "Complexion of Sodomy," a chapter in her book The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins Press, 2018); and essays by Sarah Keenan (Mercer Union, 2019) and Marianne Shaneen.