Feline tongues: elongated, textured silicone sculptures mounted on the walls like relics of a lost temple. They form a surreal, unsettling landscape, both sensual and sacred. Their presence anchors the central proposition: that divinity is not vertical, ruling from above, but horizontal — relational, embodied, and often hidden in the overlooked gestures of care, desire, and survival.
The cat tongue, at once tender and fierce, carries multiple registers. It is maternal: the first gesture of care for a newborn, cleaning, warming, protecting. It is erotic: the site of intimacy and longing. It is political: the instrument of voice, protest, and refusal. These tongues do not speak in human words, but they resonate with power, demanding recognition of a language that resists translation.
Throughout history, cats have carried this ambivalence. Worshiped in ancient Egypt as divine guardians, persecuted in medieval Europe as companions of witches, they embody sovereignty that cannot be tamed. Always feminized, always elusive, the cat exists at the threshold between the domestic and the wild, between devotion and fear. By monumentalizing their tongues, Anouk Lamm Anouk reclaims this figure as a spiritual authority, not as a pet, nor a demon, but as a protector whose power lies in ambiguity.
The tongues are not mere symbols; they are organs of contact. They blur the boundaries between care and consumption, gentleness and abrasion, language and silence. They remind us that touch — sometimes rough, sometimes soft — can be a form of knowledge, a way of writing without words. In this sense, they form a queer archive: a collection of gestures, sensations, and resistances that mainstream history has tried to erase.