Defacializing the Encounter: Bodily Disruption and the Materiality of the Non-face in Frontal Animal Images of Northern Finland

Abstract

Drawing on Tim Ingold’s rhythmical attunement and Donna Haraway’s ethics of response, this thesis establishes the function of artistic practice as an onto-epistemological framework within the extreme light environments of the Finnish Arctic. It constructs a Möbius Strip model that dialectically integrates Deleuzian “facialization” and “defacialization” with Levinas’s “ethical face” to reframe human-animal relations.

The research originates from the investigation of the frontal animal face as a gaze interface in Northern Finnish visual culture. Specifically, it addresses how the author’s psychosomatic disorder following the polar night in Rovaniemi triggered a need for individual ontological realignment. Using practice-based artistic research, this study treats the field, the existential state of the practitioner, and the creative process as unified research objects. Through the being-doing-thinking process, it identifies a significant perceptual disjunction—the “printer-like” effect perceived by viewers in response to meditative visual language. This visual alienation blocks anthropocentric emotional projection and reveals how the individual, in a state of “defacialization”, uses embodied practice to achieve an ontological suturing between biological rhythms and environmental cycles.

The study concludes that extreme environmental conditions function as a necessary trigger for defacialization. By refusing the gaze and withdrawing from social identity, the practitioner accepts the "face" given by the animal, thereby establishing an egalitarian and reciprocal interspecies onto-epistemology.