Hypertier

Hypertier is a fine-art conceptual documentary series exploring the fragile and paradoxical forms of

human-animal coexistence across a dispersed archipelago of interdependent environments.

Traversing natural history museums, aquariums, landfills, private homes, and scientific facilities across

Europe and Africa, the images form a fragmented record of encounters ranging from the intimate to

the exploitative, the sacred to the absurd.

Influenced by Andrea Branzi’s “The Primitive Metropolis”, the work embraces the contemporary city

as a hybrid space where remnants of nature seep through infrastructures of control. Animals appear

not in untouched wilderness but in compromised, human-modified contexts: exotic pets in sterile

apartments, endangered species at scientific installations, or taxidermied bodies trapped in glass

vitrines. Yet, this exploration also evokes historical archetypes, such as the ancient relationship

between the falconer and the hawk or the hypnotic sway of the snake charmer, symbols of a long

history of human control over, and communion with, the animal world, where creatures are revered,

feared, or managed for ritual and spectacle.

In our current era, marked by ecological crisis, care and veneration operate on the same plane as

control and extraction. In these hyper-constructed spaces, protection and confinement become

indistinguishable. Private reserves and safari parks have become fenced fortresses to protect rhinos

and elephants from poachers descending in helicopters. On massive recycling landfills, humans strive

to provide animals with the best life possible within putrid environments, shooing cattle to the top

of trash mountains so they can breathe fresher air and sweeping their pathways cleaner than their

own patios. While massive egg factories operate relentlessly to satisfy human demand, microscopic

plankton in the oceans break down plastics into lethal fragments, ingesting them only to starve

without caloric intake, passing toxins up the marine food chain and turning "plastic-free" fish into

rare, living jewels.

The work also exposes the brutal economics of modern wildlife: the rapidly dwindling global lion

population turned into priced targets for trophy hunters, and the illicit trade driving the pangolin

toward extinction. Aquariums and museums operate on this same edge, as elaborate theaters of

containment, offering the illusion of proximity while maintaining absolute control. This historical echo

reverberates in the photograph of Charles Darwin’s handwritten diary, preserved in Cambridge,

which reflects on Indigenous peoples’ relationships with animals, linking colonial knowledge systems

to present-day urges to classify, dominate, and romanticize nature. This archival fragment is a

poignant reminder of how knowledge, colonialism, and taxonomy have long intertwined in defining

the "animal."

According to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), we are facing a mass extinction

event where up to 150 species vanish each day. While science calculates this through mathematical

projections, my photographic work approaches it through a personal lens. Driven by a deep sense of

connection to non-human intelligence, these images form a visual record of shared yet contested

spaces—where animals exist by cleaving to hyper-constructed conditions of coexistence. Ultimately,

this project questions not just how we look at animals, but what these ways of seeing reveal about us.

In a time of ecological collapse, these images ask: what does it mean to coexist?

The project unfolds through three conceptual strands, Episteme, Dispositive, and Repair, structuring its

inquiry into human-animal relations, in a loose resonance with the “Third Paradise” and its triple-infinity

symbol.

Episteme

addresses the systems of knowledge through which animals are observed, classified, and understood,

from classical taxonomy to museum archives.

Dispositive

examines the architectures and mechanisms of control, zoos, laboratories, infrastructures, and

technologies, that shape and regulate animal life.

Repair turns to gestures of care, conservation, and coexistence, acknowledging both their necessity

and their entanglement within the very systems they seek to counter.

Together, these three dimensions form a fragmented yet interconnected framework through which

this selection of images from the series, can be read.