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Ivana Filip

Ivana Filip is a Croatia-based artist, activist and researcher. Her practice grows from visual art
and stretches through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work, across performance, live work,
video, photography and mixed media. Her work has developed from body-based to movement
and interspecies collaborations including performances with dogs and their human companions,
dog hair tapestry and interspecies collaboration research with free-roaming cats.
In the last few years, Ivana’s quest has been human-nonhuman relationships and more-than-
human creativity. To achieve these she uses many tools from anthrozoology, ethology,
anthropology, animal studies, sociology, spirituality, activism, indigenous methodologies,
ecofeminism and personal experiences.
Ivana earned her Master of Economics at the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb, Master of Arts at
the Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts in Tilburg and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the
Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown locally, nationally and
internationally, in non-profit spaces, libraries, symposiums, galleries and museums.
In addition to her artistic practice, Ivana volunteers, engages in activism, writes, mentors and
collaborates with various humans and nonhumans including cats, dogs, sea, books, air, plants,
wind, leftovers, recyclables, branches. She enjoys walking with her cat collaborator Ixxo and
playing at home with her cat collaborators Cici, Lili and Lori, learning about the
interconnectedness of all life.

Object-Memento Mori


Rejecting the opportunity to work in a bank, I dove into the exploration of artistic creation and
study. My prior study of economics influenced me to question the sustainability of my artistic
processes, of the cycle of a material, a product of art and its dissemination. Through this
development, I came to prefer art as sustainable and symbiotic and see my artistic process as a
holistic one.
Using varied media and disciplines, I research embodied, theoretical, political and social
implications of our anthropocentric belief systems, question ways of living and existing, notions of
rightness and wrongness, other and otherness and what it means to be a human today. I am
especially committed to the research of trust and empathy, senses and bioethics, within the
range of human-nonhuman relationships, in order to point to our responsibilities and
interrelatedness to/with Others.
Though curious about humans, our long-term destructive anthropocentrism shifted my practice
and my preference toward a non-human non-invasive creative interspecies collaboration. Not
only in my art but in my life too, I am concerned with changes that create a finer mutual future.
This manifests in a vegan diet, up-cycling and reuse in order to minimize my footprint. Often I fail
in these pursuits, but in the end, it is not about perfection but respect and care.

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