Missing Dogs, Missing Otherness

By Natalia Calderon & Eun Hyung Kim

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Unknown situations scare us; they bring us out from the comfortable practice that we display in the secure area, where nothing surprises us. Strangers symbolizing the unknown and must be exiled, destroyed or at least absolved by the “normality”. Their lack of hygiene, their way of questioning the rules of behavior, and their different order of hierarchies, show us our own fragility and instability. The figure of the stranger or the outsider has this role of confrontation, of looking at things form a different perspective (context).

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Missing Dogs, Missing Otherness is a project that seeks of highlighting the fact that there is a necessity for the unknown in our communities. Places like IJburg where plans and rules suffocate any differences, need to accept the unknown, the other. We used portrays of stray dogs as a metaphor of the immigrant (the other), to confront the “normality” of domestic dogs. Stray dogs are unclean, unhealthy, unsafe; they confront the parameters of the ruled, the responsibility of their owner. They are not private property, they belong to the community, questioning the relation between ownership (private property) and belonging as public process. 

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Posters of stray dogs were hanged in public spaces during April 2009 on IJburg.