The Zoo Story (2007) is a good example of alternative narrative models. Friedl had a stuffed giraffe transported on loan from the West Bank to Kassel for documenta 12 and displayed in the
documenta Halle. Brownie, a bull giraffe from South Africa, had lived in the Qalqiliya Zoo in the West Bank since 1997. One night, following an Israeli military operation during the Second Intifada, the animal panicked, fell to the ground, and eventually died on August 19, 2002; it was subsequently prepared, stuffed, and mounted by the zoo’s veterinarian. Along with other animals that died at the zoo, the taxidermy giraffe stood in a museum-like annex of the zoo (where it returned after documenta ended). Instead of (re)producing pictorial documents from a situation of political crisis oversaturated with images, Friedl turns the giraffe itself into a “document,” thus short-circuiting the opposition between image and reality, representation and thing, image and original inasmuch as it is itself the (dead) “original” that tests its own representability in the expositional dispositif of documenta 12.
