learning that I share the Earth with animals beyond my imagination
An evening with Brandon Kilbourne & Lara Rüter

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© Jamila K. Grote

© Franz Gruenewald

On this evening, two poets come together whose lyrical and essayistic work engages with related questions: How do we humans think about animals — the living and the dead — beyond all anthropomorphism? What do we learn from them, what interests are at play in each case, and at whose expense are these interests pursued?

Brandon Kilbourne (born 1983 in Houma, Louisiana) is an evolutionary biologist at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. His research focuses primarily on the morphology and variation of anatomical traits in animals, for instance in studies of skull and bone shapes across different species. He is particularly interested in how his field — natural history — is inseparably intertwined with colonialism and, in particular, with transatlantic slavery. These dark undercurrents beneath a history that proclaimed itself enlightened, and the ominous entanglement of knowledge production and exploitation, are also central themes in his poetry debut: the Cave Canem Prize–winning volume Natural History (Graywolf Press 2025).

In this book, Kilbourne turns to natural history objects from his current workplace and traces their evolutionary and provenance histories. One poem, for example, describes the famous skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai (a dinosaur from the Late Jurassic), which was transported to Berlin from a dig site in what was then the German colony of Deutsch-Ostafrika (today Tanzania). Kilbourne also portrays the lifeless harmony of dioramas’ pseudo-idylls, in which wild nature is restaged and translated into the scale of a dollhouse. Another poem is written from the perspective of a Steller’s sea cow, the last of its kind: these animals were exterminated through intensive hunting within just 27 years of their first discovery by humans. Kilbourne writes that he has learned he shares the Earth with animals that exceed his imagination; at the same time, he is constantly reminded that even the most fantastic wonder is often nothing more than bycatch of hunger.

Lara Rüter (born 1990 in Hanover) shares with Brandon Kilbourne not only an interest in sea cows and dioramas. In her debut volume amoretten in netzen (Verlag Das Wunderhorn 2024), awarded the Kranichsteiner Literaturförderpreis of the Deutscher Literaturfonds, she writes about “romantically foolish” animals such as dolphins — these “super-intelligent creatures” — about a centuries-old Greenland shark, and a white mammoth. Readers follow her to Pongoland, the great ape enclosure at Leipzig Zoo; to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; and to the Atlantis Memorial Reef, an underwater mausoleum for cremated remains. They learn about point mutation, coral bleaching, and extinct animal genera from the Middle Cambrian.

Her book-length essay Affenliebe has just been published by Hanser Verlag. In it, she recounts her years of work at a primate research institute and her everyday interactions with the inhabitants of the monkey house. The book also addresses human relationships with animals, the destruction of habitats, and human fantasies of restitution. Affenliebe is an erudite work populated by key witnesses ranging from Gaius Plinius Secundus and Jane Goodall to Kafka’s ape Rotpeter from Ein Bericht an eine Akademie. At the same time, it is a deeply personal book in which Rüter describes how apes quietly made their way into her life.

The event will be interpreted in English and German. With kind support from ECHOO-Konferenzdolmetschen.

In reading & conversation: Brandon Kilbourne, Lara Rüter
Moderation: Asmus Trautsch