ANIMALS INSIDE
A History of Objects and Furniture for Pets in Domestic Interiors
November 17, 2025
HEAD – Genève, Avenue de Châtelaine 7, 1203 Geneva, Design Room
Animals Inside: A History of Objects and Furniture for Pets in Domestic Interiors is a symposium that explores the material, spatial, and cultural intersections between human and animal life within the domestic sphere. By tracing the evolution of objects and furniture created for non-human companions — from antiquity to the digital present — the event examines how animals’ presence has shaped, challenged, and expanded our conception of home. Through a rich series of talks by designers, architects, historians, artists, and theorists, the symposium investigates the gradual domestication not only of animals but of design itself, as human creativity adapts to the needs, habits, and emotional bonds of interspecies coexistence.
The program begins with reflections on the notion of boundaries and shared environments, with Daniel Zamarbide’s Sealed Communities and Gabi Schillig’s Spaces of the Animals examining architectural and social frameworks that accommodate, restrict, or reinterpret animal presence. Estelle Christe’s Domestic Wilderness delves into the paradox of bringing nature inside, while Laura Mucciolo’s The Entomologist’s House explores how air, structure, and movement reconfigure the home as a porous habitat.
Afternoon sessions turn to the digital and performative dimensions of interspecies life: Kim Schönauer’s Digital Domestication: DOG TV investigates new media designed for animal spectatorship, and Anne Hölck’s Zebra Hygiene and Rhinos on Stage examines how animals appear and perform within domestic and theatrical contexts. Subsequent talks, including Marine de Dardel’s The Cage as Dispositif and Ayaka Okamoto’s Visual Effects in Living Environment Coexisting with Dogs, highlight how confinement, visibility, and sensory design have historically mediated relationships between species.
The symposium concludes with perspectives that expand domesticity beyond the human, as Riccardo Miotto’s Cages Series reimagines containment as aesthetic inquiry, and Francisco García Triviño and Paula V. Álvarez’s The History of Architecture Expanded by Pigeons propose a reframing of architectural history through animal agency. Finally, Antonio Yemail Cortés’s Shared Territories of Repair reflects on domestic architectures of care and coexistence in Colombia, grounding interspecies cohabitation in contexts of repair and reciprocity.
Taken together, Animals Inside positions the home as a dynamic site of negotiation between humans and animals — a place where design becomes a form of dialogue, empathy, and adaptation. By focusing on objects as mediators of these relationships, the symposium invites a reconsideration of domesticity itself: not as a purely human domain, but as a shared habitat continuously reshaped by the creatures who inhabit it.
PROGRAM
11:30–12:00 Welcome reception
12:00–13:00 Lunch
13:00–13:15 Javier Fernández Contreras & Youri Kravtchenko, Introduction
Boundaries and Shared Environments
13:15–13:40 Daniel Zamarbide, Sealed Communities
13:45–14:10 Gabi Schillig, Spaces of the Animals
14:15–14:40 Estelle Christe, Domestic Wilderness
14:45–15:10 Laura Mucciolo, The Entomologist’s House or How Air Flows through the Wings of a Beam Shaped like a Spar
15:10–15:25 Break (15 min)
Performative and Digital Dimensions
15:25–15:50 Kim Schönauer, Digital Domestication: DOG TV
15:55–16:20 Anne Hölck, Zebra Hygiene and Rhinos on Stage
16:25–16:50 Marine de Dardel, The Cage as Dispositif: Framing Power, Desire, and Wonder in Domestic Interiors
16:55–17:20 Ayaka Okamoto, Visual Effects in Living Environment Coexisting with Dogs
17:20–17:35 Break (15 min)
Domesticity Beyond the Human
17:35–18:00 Riccardo Miotto, Cages Series
18:05–18:30 Francisco García Triviño, Paula V. Álvarez, The History of Architecture Expanded by Pigeons
18:35–19:00 Antonio Yemail Cortés, Shared Territories of Repair: Domestic Architectures for Interspecies Cohabitation in Colombia
19:00–20:30 Cocktail dinner
