“Which one is Adonis?” or perhaps yourself? recasts the classic existentialist dilemma onto the question of species this time, and, implicitly, of the person — however the latter may be defined — for in a presumed new era of the Novacene, set in a fairly near future, the delimitation of species can no longer be reduced to the Cartesian human–animal binary, disclosing instead a structure of interference, an “interspecies”. Familiar at once through the lens of Donna Haraway — who, as early as the 1980s, recalibrated our perception of technological extension as already a direct part of the “human,” and who later, in “When Species Meet”, extended that same porosity toward the animal — and through Jacques Derrida, who signalled a reciprocity of the gaze between the human being and the animal, in this case the cat, Vera deconstructs the human’s proto-extensions toward an affective interference between the two species, through a pop register of reading.

The idolatry of the animal focal point — more precisely, of the cat Adonis — is obsessively multiplied, both for an excessive familiarisation with her image and for a dilution of the instantiation of any single figure, according to a Warholian serial logic. Adonis is, above all, a replaceable contour, into which we may symbolically deposit any affective figure that resonates with us. Features visible in works such as “in between”, “multiply”, and “in between again” suggest, rather, emotional “captures” (akin to photographic ones), interchangeable with human ones. This pop cat is therefore not a pop cat in itself, for her signifier floats free, refusing to be pinned down except through the filter of the viewer, whose plurality intersects with the autobiographical stake.

The supposedly watertight boundaries between species are in fact destabilised above all through emotion and attachment. Vera’s (self-)portraits grow diffuse precisely because they detach themselves from Jacques Derrida’s concept of “l’animot”, which denounced the absurdity of reducing an irreducible multiplicity of species to the singular “the Animal.” Vera embraces that reduction in symbolic rather than biological terms, for Adonis is at once icon and non-icon. Derrida, pursuing this thread of relationality, had already outlined the destabilisation of the human’s sovereign position in relation to the animal — since the suffering of the latter contaminated him, exposing him as a being just as mortal, such that the spectrum of emotions became a ground of encounter in which the gaze fractures “mastery.” Vera proposes, however, in place of the shame invoked by Derrida, affection as the principal process of approach, whether in terms of physical resemblance or of reciprocal empathy.

Vera Buzdugan (b. 2002, Iași) earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the “George Enescu” National University of Arts, majoring in painting. She also studied painting as part of an Erasmus exchange program in Verona, Italy. Her artistic practice, with an emphasis on painting, explores themes such as the relationship between image, identity, and contemporary visual culture through painting, seriality, and large-scale canvases. She has participated in national and international group exhibitions, including “Around the Square” (Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, Virginia, USA, 2022), “Water & Land” (National Geological Museum, Bucharest, 2024), “Atelier 35” (Iași, 2023), and “Fail Better” (Aparte Gallery, Iași, 2026).