The phenomenon of human zoos, exhibited in Europe, served to establish economic expansionist principles by constructing notions of the savage, the exotic and the other. From 1815 to 1958, they signified the popularization of European racism and the legitimization of conquest over the territories of these non-European places. From 1874, with Germany taking the lead, the animal trader Karl Hagenbeck was the artificer of human zoos. He staged shows featuring individuals from “exotic” peoples. In the first year he received one million visitors.

On May 6th, 1889, the Universal Exposition was held in Paris. As part of the celebration of the Revolution and its motto of Equality, Fraternity and Liberty, Selk’nam people kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego were exhibited as savages along with other aborigines. The Lumière brothers made films of the exhibition, recording its multitudinous attendance and the enjoyment of these human exhibits. The Jardin d’Acclimatation, in Paris, was one of the places built as a scenography to exhibit animals, plants and “savages”.

The “scientific gaze” also helped to emphasize the cultural differences between Western and non-European nations. For this purpose, this gaze on these bodies will be collected. In Darwin’s travel diaries one can read that he considered the Fuegians as “the most abject and miserable creatures”. Darwin came to the false conviction that the natives practiced cannibalism. These “scientific” conclusions became popular from 1850 onwards. In those years appeared the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853) by the French writer Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, the initial work of the racist philosophy. His thesis, based on the racial factor, states that the Aryan racial superiority lies in “the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength”, later taken up by Nazism.

The exhibition “Zoo” takes this cultural, social, and geopolitical phenomenon of human zoos in Europe to make explicit the magnitude of its influence over time and the geopolitical and urban extension in different European cities. The work proposes an immersion in this hidden history that maintains a current relevance through the supremacist discourses that have emerged in our contemporary time.