THE TRIBUNAL OF ANIMALS
Mechanical theater, a project for the Expo 2002, Switzerland

Art Director at Steiner Sarnen Swiss

Story and Pictures: Hugo Schaer
Music: Matthias Rüegg

Man is the pride of creation. Animals are his utilities, his pest, his favorites.

The anthropocentric sight on creature is antiquated and obsolete - and still very popular though. It is still existent in the concience of man, and it still determines the attitude of man towards animals. Man is the pride of creation - we experience the fatal effects of this assumption everyday.

Man too is an animal.

We realize these assumptions in a jury tribunal. Animal puts man on trial, represented by Adam and Eve. On the basis of univocal means of evidence animal charges man of bothering the ecological balance in his greed for power and consumption - and therefore of jeopardising massively the pith and marrow of existence. Man is accused of exploiting animals by his want. The tribunal is being stage-managed as a fulminating, mechanical musical play.
The chief judge, the attorney, the counsel for the defence, the witnesses for prosecution, even the pieces of evidence and corpus delicti - in this mechanical machinery they all show up before the jury, brought in on rails, on revolving stages, by linkages and conveyer belts as they use it in the slaughter houses.

The visitors are being transformed into animals by use of masks. Masked as "Favorites", "Pest" and "Utilities" of man the visitors offciate as jurymen in the arena of court room. It is up to them to plead "guilty" or "not guilty".