What happens, then, when a chimp takes hold of temporality? This question drives Santino’s Gift. His activity becomes an event which disrupts the comfortable trajectory of human uniqueness. This is a gift for him.
The project began with Santino the chimpanzee who likes to throw rocks at visitors to the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. What is strikingly uncommon about Santino is his forethought in collecting the rocks before visitors arrive. The preeminent philosopher Martin Heidegger uses forethought as the scaffolding for explaining human uniqueness in his work Being and Time.
In response to the chimp’s rupturing human preeminence, scientists studied and reported on the his ability while the zoo keepers castrated Santino as a mode of control over his behavior and future plans. Santino’s Gift is an art project designed to give Santino a present of Heidegger's Being and Time which he can make use of while in confinement and down on his luck.