Exposition Plantes and People, Musée d'arts - Nantes

The animal at the Frac in Carquefou

The exhibition at the Frac des Pays de la Loire in Carquefou runs from January 30 to April 26, 2026.

At the Frac, the animal side of the exhibition unfolds around the theme of vulnerability. With Bestiary by Indian collective Raqs Media Collective. Golden silhouettes of endangered or extinct animal creatures draw up a melancholy inventory of a world in peril, consumed by ecological urgency.

This meditation on extinction and survival is echoed in Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s Entry into the Ark (17th c.), in which the biblical deluge reflects our ecological concerns, and in Slavs and Tatars’ reinvention of the Simurgh , a mythical, immortal chimeric creature that crosses eras to question the memory of past catastrophes. The exhibition thus weaves a web of metamorphoses, where man and beast merge in a disturbing play of mirrors. Anthropomorphism is no longer a mere device, but an invitation to identify, a way of probing empathy where the boundary between “us” and “them” dissolves. For if the animal is our double, perhaps its fate foreshadows our own – a cruel fable in which disappearance is no longer an abstraction, but an omen.