Animal Land
Animal Land is a visual metaphor for wildlife in the industrialized world, an unfolding narrative that wavers between displacement, reintroduction, and loss.
Eco-political artist Lauren Strohacker and digital video artist Kendra Sollars began collaborating on Animal Land in 2013, combining Strohacker’s animal-centric public art practice with Sollars’s experience in digital media technology to reimagine traditional wildlife encounters through digital video projections. The artists work with wildlife rehabilitation centers, education institutions, and sanctuaries to collect animal footage, highlighting both the animals affected by and humans responding to interspecies conflict in urban and suburban space. The footage collected with the help of these organizations are edited to be slow-moving, soundless, ghost-like entities completely decontextualized from a natural environment in order to inhabit and confront the built environment in which they are projected.
La Biennale Architettura 2025
Four new Animal Land projections were commissioned by Studio Gang to accompany The Living Orders of Venice in the Arsenale for La Biennale Architettura 2025
“As the planet grows more crowded, and wilder spaces continue to disappear, architecture must adapt to form an urban habitat that accommodates both humans and non-humans. The Living Orders of Venice builds interest, wonder, and care for non-human city dwellers by hosting a crowdsourced ecological field study of the Biennale grounds using iNaturalist, a citizen-science app. It also playfully engages the classical orders of architecture by creating prototypes of three “Living Orders”: novel forms of shelter suited not to an idealised human body, but to Venice’s animal inhabitants.”
Learn more about The Living Orders of Venice on Studio Gang’s Website
Learn more about The Living Orders of Venice at the Arsenale on La Biennale’s Website
ArtPrize X
Regional owl species filmed at Blandford Nature Center and projected onto the Grand Rapids Art Museum for ArtPrize X.
Animal Land was a Time-Based Public Vote Finalist
DLECTRICITY
Red Fox filmed at Southwest Wildlife Conservation Center and projected onto Rite Aid Building for DLECTRICITY 2017.
Earth Now | Earth 2050 Symposium at UCLA
Animal Land projections commissioned for The Hill by UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies
Annenberg Space for Photography
In 2016, Strohacker and Sollars presented Animal Land: Visualizing Cohabitation & Conflict for the Annenberg Space for Photography's Iris Nights Lecture Series.
Click here to watch the full Iris Nights Lecture: Visualizing Cohabitation & Conflict
3 part interview with Annenberg Space for Photography
Animal Land is an on-going project. See all installation videos on Vimeo. Follow the project by visiting and liking our Facebook Page.
Use the map below to explore the places Animal Land has inhabited.