“When the Monkey Met the Fox: the Endless Betrayal”
(January 16 – March 27, 2025)

Welcome to When the Monkey Met the Fox: the Endless Betrayal, an exhibition that invites reflection on how humanity has renounced its own animality and degraded individuals of other species to an inferior category, reducing them to mere objects at the service of human needs and desires.

Artists Ruth Montiel Arias and Carlos Alba present this separation and discrimination as a betrayal which, like all betrayals, carries a burden of shame and discomfort that often leads us to conceal or deny it. Yet hiding a betrayal does not halt its harmful consequences; on the contrary, it intensifies them, as the lack of acknowledgement prevents us from addressing their causes and repairing the damage inflicted. This exhibition seeks precisely to expose that betrayal, to break the silence that sustains it, and to open pathways for reflection and transformation in our relationship with other animals.

To this end, the artists propose a dialogue between two visual and conceptual narratives that, while seemingly different, are deeply interconnected—particularly in relation to exploitation and interdependence between human and non-human animals. EL 2% by Ruth Montiel Arias and I’ll Bet The Devil My Head by Carlos Alba explore the potential to transcend power relations and interspecies hierarchies, questioning the boundaries between humans and animals.

In EL 2%, Ruth Montiel Arias offers an analysis of the systematic exploitation of animals, focusing on non-human primates. Through a series of visual and narrative interventions, the artist disrupts dynamics of domination and stability, compelling viewers to reflect on our relationships with individuals of other species. The work thus becomes a tool for questioning the normalization of exploitative economies and interspecies cultural domination.

In I’ll Bet The Devil My Head, Carlos Alba employs autobiographical and documentary methods to construct a narrative that explores the social structures shaping our perceptions of and relationships with other animals—specifically foxes. Alba portrays human–non-human relationships in urban environments, revealing how these interactions are conditioned by opportunity, cultural connections, and systemic barriers.

What both projects share is their capacity to reveal the complexities of animal exploitation and human responsibility from different perspectives. Montiel Arias approaches these issues from a macro perspective, while Alba adopts a micro perspective, observing specific experiences as reflections of broader systems. Together, their works invite audiences into a shared space of contemplation, where personal stories and global landscapes intertwine, challenging notions of domination and coexistence between human and non-human animals.

The exhibition brings together two contributions by artists and animal rights activists that open a discursive territory challenging us not only as spectators, but also as participants in the social, economic, and political structures that sustain systems of domination and exploitation.

The silence and oblivion that have long surrounded this domination—the betrayal denounced by the exhibition—have contributed to perpetuating a system exacerbated throughout successive stages of human history. For other animals, the consequences are devastating. For human animals, they are as well.

Each year, this system of exploitation consumes the lives of billions of beings through the food industry, scientific experimentation, entertainment, fashion, exotic species trafficking, hunting, and traditional medicine, among other practices. In the case of non-human primates, this entails habitat destruction, hunting, confinement, exhibition, and experimentation. Foxes, historically persecuted and stigmatized for cultural, economic, and symbolic reasons, are now additionally criminalized for entering urban spaces. For humans, this betrayal has profoundly shaped our relationship with the natural world and with ourselves, resulting in environmental destruction, increased public health crises, the normalization of violence, and a deep moral conflict.

Confronting the hierarchical and discriminatory divisions created between human and non-human animals leads us to ask fundamental questions about our place and impact on all forms of life. From this emerges an opportunity: to adopt an open, critical, and reflective perspective, and to join a conversation that concerns not only animals, but also the values and ethics that define our society.

We invite you to embark on this journey of reflection and discovery, in the hope of transforming not only how we see other animals, but also how we see ourselves.

UPF–Centre for Animal Ethics

This exhibition has been organized to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Centre for Animal Ethics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, founded in December 2015.

Project Directors
Núria Almiron
Paula Casal

Exhibition coordination · Àrea Tallers Gallery
Matilde Obradors

With the collaboration of:
Poblenou Campus Directorate
Infrastructure and Heritage Service