Animal Crossdressing

In summer 2001, I had a five-week residency on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. While visiting the Emperor Valley Zoo in Port of Spain one day, I befriended the zookeeper who was in charge of the snakes. Over several weeks, I watched him feed and care for the snakes and witnessed many mice, rats, guinea pigs, and even rabbits being swallowed whole. I never got entirely used to watching the feedings and couldn’t squelch my sentimental impulse to devise a scheme for the prey animal to escape its fate. Port of Spain abounds with fabric stores, stocked with everything from staid gray cottons used for school uniforms to outrageous shimmery synthetics used to make costumes for Trinidad’s famous Carnival. Given this strong cultural tradition of masquerade, I decided to make an outfit for a rat that would disguise it as a snake. I found a stretchy nylon snakeskin print that was perfect for the task at hand and also fashioned a costume for a snake by encasing it in sheer pink nylon and transforming it into the tail of an enormous, three-foot-long stuffed rat. I restaged the project in New York in 2002 with pet animals in a more controlled studio environment and documented it using photography and video. It wasn’t until I saw the footage that I realized how many additional transformations had come into play: the snake’s disguised body, lying inside the unzipped rat suit, looked like the intestines of the giant rat. But at the same time, the snake also looked like prey inside the intestines of a huge, eviscerated rodent that had just turned the tables on a snake and swallowed it whole.