The starting point for the series “Brut” is the forward-looking dystopian novel Ad Bestias by Francesca Sarah Toich, which explores parasitism between species. The protagonist undergoes an unwanted pregnancy as a human breeding body for a white rhinoceros – a struggle for sheer survival unfolds.

Totzauer’s imaginative world takes up the political and feminist dimensions of the colonization of corporeality. Rooted in postcolonial discourse, the resulting works dissect themes such as otherness, belonging, and identity. The artist creates hybrid beings endowed with human attributes, while their interior harbors an alien life – liminal creatures of cell, egg, and amphibian, alien embryos freshly arrived from space. They linger in transitional states: in the incubator, awaiting birth; on the slaughter table, awaiting death.

The exposed entrails of the doomed animal on the butcher’s block lead us deep into human anatomy. Microscopic recordings of sperm transform into an inner landscape, lending the entrails a disturbingly human quality. Inside another creature’s belly, the viewer becomes witness to a final digestive process – just before the being itself is prepared. A not-yet-hatched creature peers out with a weary eye from its warm incubator. Yet the eye itself is nothing but the endoscopy of a colon – glimpses into the darkest recesses of human existence.

The series brings together video and ceramic sculpture to form what Totzauer calls Techno Ceramics – a dialogue between a millennia-old, enduring material and a rapid, digital image world.