For seventeen years during the mid-eighteenth century, a rhinoceros named Clara was toured through Europe as an exotic specimen. She was brought to the Netherlands from Bengal on the private initiative of Douwe Jansz Mout van der Meer, a captain with the Dutch East India Company who understood the business potential of the animal, despite the investment and associated difficulties and expenses. The captain became famous for ‘his’ rhinoceros, with which he gave performances in several European countries.

Rossella Biscotti’s installation Clara plays with the weight, value and investment relating to this exotic animal. Each brick in the three one-ton stacks of handmade bricks that constitute this installation bears a stamped outline of Clara, referencing her weight as commodity status and the Dutch colonial traders who used bricks as ballast in their ships going East. The pile of tobacco refers to the amount supposedly used to keep Clara calm during the voyages and the spectacles where she was paraded. A vinyl sticker shows the amount of gold écu (old French coin) that was unsuccessfully requested for the purchase of the animal by King Louis XV for his Versailles menagerie. Being defined in this work by inessential factors – its weight, its daily consumption of food and ‘vices’ (sea stories tell that the animal was addicted to tobacco), and its monetary value – the animal is here treated as an equivalent to a constantly fluctuating value that does not correspond to the unity of its being. Clara, in effect, is reduced to commodified equivalences and to an object-spectacle from which monetary and symbolic value are intended to be extracted.