The cabinet looks empty — I take a step towards it, my breath fogging the glass. Keeping my gaze fixed, something amidst the vegetation faintly moves. Crawling, the stick insects manifest their presence like an apparition, they manifest themselves as some pictures do, emerging from certain dark recesses where they receded to nest. The animal that I am longs for proximity, snouts touching, but something keeps getting in the way. I try and try and try but my earth-sharing companions remain beyond my reach, they linger like ghosts on my film roll, trembling ever so slightly in the red light of the darkroom. I bring my snout close to the photographic paper and sniffle to pick up a scent to guide me back, but I am pricked by a sense of anticipated grief — are we able to preserve life only in its most mortifying form, petrified in museum cabinets and in photographs alike? And yet I return and show up for this encounter over and over again, love and longing making a fool of me, as I stay awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog. All Things Laid Dormant tries to take a peek at certain things that inhabit us but lie dormant, occasionally slipping out to prick us: the forbidden suspicion of being animals, the desire for proximity to other living creatures, the knowledge that we are experiencing a mass extinction, the grief we do not allow ourselves to feel whilst losing creatures with whom we share life on this planet. All Things Laid Dormant looks for encounters and questions the ways in which we enter in relationship to other animals, the space they occupy in our personal and collective imaginary, and whether it is possible for us to build new kinships and intimacies with these relatives that sometimes feel far far away from us. At the heart of the work lie questions of inhabiting and co-habiting, and a desire to reclaim a place of belonging in the family of things.