Cristina Malerba
ZHdK Research Tours The Captured Animal: Encounter at the ETH Bildarchiv Zürich
Tour Description:
How does photography capture, distort, or deny the animal?
This research tour offers a critically engaged journey through the ETH Zurich Image Archive, focusing on images that frame animals as companions, laborers, specimens, and objects of fascination. From portraits of domesticated creatures to staged taxidermy and scientific images, the selected materials expose historical ways of classifying, displaying, and disciplining the non-human. What traces of affection, violence, or curiosity linger in these images? Through close looking and collective discussion, participants will interrogate the politics of visibility embedded in archival practices—asking what is shown, what is omitted, and what remains unspeakable. This curated encounter invites reflection on the visual legacies that continue to shape how we see, represent, and relate to the non-human world today.
Meeting point: ETH Main Building, Rämistrasse 101, 8006 Zürich
1 hour 15 minutes | EN
Bio:
Cristina Malerba is a curator and art researcher. She is currently pursuing a postgraduate degree in Cultural Critique and Curatorial Studies at ZHdK, Zurich, after completing a BA in Visual Arts at NABA, Milan. She curated the group exhibition Pianerottolo in collaboration with the collective SPECIFIC at BiM, Milan. She has worked as an assistant at Galleria Martina Simeti and at Archivio Turi Simeti, where she contributed to exhibition-making and archival practices. Her curatorial interests focus on critical mediation and collective research, particularly within visual art history and archival contexts.
