This article examines the possibilities of visual culture to open new
perspectives on interspecies relations by analyzing self-portraits from
visual artist Elina Brotherus’s photography series Carpe Fucking Diem
(2011–2015). Brotherus has suggested that this series talks “about a
failure to have a family with kids and give normality the finger”. The
self-portraits can be seen to address this “failure” to have a normative
nuclear family, while simultaneously questioning the desirability of
the norm itself through Brotherus’s relationship with her pet dog,
dachshund Marcello. The article explores the more-than-human notions of
kinship and family in Carpe Fucking Diem, drawing on Donna Haraway’s
concept of companion species, as well as discussions on new materialism
and posthumanism. The concept of companion species deconstructs human
exceptionalism and the boundaries between human and animal, and
indicates that the physical and affective co-becomings between humans
and the non-human significant others co-evolve with each other in
complex and asymmetrical ways. In affective and embodied readings of
three self-portraits and one video work from the Carpe Fucking Diem
series, I examine how Elina Brotherus’s self-portraits call into
question the normative notions of family as human-centered and
heteronormative.