This post is the third in a series marking the 50th anniversary of the passing of Bill C-373, “An Act to provide for the recognition of the Beaver (Castor canadensis) as a symbol of the sovereignty of the Dominion of Canada,” edited by Blair Stein.
CASTOR is an experimental typeface comprised of 109 glyphs, which is a result from a thorough study of toothmarks and patterns left by a beaver (Castor canadensis) on a piece of oak.
It is part of an in-progress body of work, A Study of Beaverness or Sharp-Toothed Dreams, which is a multidisciplinary art project that proposes a speculative beaver-centric imaginarium inspired by their stories and entanglements with humans across hemispheres, timelines, and territories. By examining the presence of the beaver as a non-local species in southern Chile and Argentina and its historical significance in North America’s colonial expansion, the project looks at the parallel threads that connect these seemingly distant narratives to critically examine the spectrum of relationships we establish with nonhuman animals. Historically, beavers have embodied that complexity of entanglements; they have been considered a commodity, a metaphor, a nuisance, an invasive species, a capitalist emblem, a national symbol, an ecological restoration hero, and have played many other roles in different cultural domains. Their physical and symbolic vitality has been disproportionately extracted for human benefit.
A Study of Beaverness responds critically to how many nonhuman animals have been utilized as a propelling force by Western capitalist world-systems and pushed to the margins in equal measure. Trying to depart from the common tropes that reduce animals to mere narrative props, the project attempts to envisage a world where beaver dreams, visions, and their stories of entanglement with humans transform into an alternative visual universe narrated from their point of view or in nearness to them.
Recognizing that visual representation can also perpetuate anthropocentric narratives, the project seeks to recast other forms of storytelling that frame the animal outside human-centric storylines and reframe them as agents and historical subjects on their own right, developing alternative iconographies to experiment with non-anthropocentric methods of storytelling. CASTOR emerged as part of this process and has also transformed into an independent art piece and play tool to think-with or dream with beaver world-making.
The typeset was inspired by the markings on a piece of oak carved by a beaver in Frick Park, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2022. Located entirely within a metropolitan area, this urban park lacks the space for beaver communities to set roots. Still, many young beavers use it as a transitory dwelling before continuing their journey for the mating season. The piece is evidence of a learning process but also a glimpse that lets us bear witness to the expansiveness of beaver world-making and the transformation of their surroundings. The young beaver left the area, but the piece remained and became an artifact of play and exploration.
Although the piece has no use in dam-making, it offers proximity to beaverness and a speculative space to connect with their worlds: the log contains the trace of a beaver’s process while felling a tree, the possible angles used by it for a more successful carving, its hesitations, and sudden changes of mind. We can follow the route of the beaver’s iron-rich orange teeth like plows furrowing the surface of a field, and sense the rhythm of their carving as their teeth quickly removed the soft wood. This piece incorporates the movement of the beaver body and the ways it carves out and shapes its surrounding world. From the observations of the piece, the following questions began to arise: Is it possible to establish a visual system that bears witness to the ways another being shapes its surrounding world? Can we get closer to beaver world-making or propose an alternative system for approaching it in novel ways?
As a result of these reflections, the gnaws on the surface started to resemble a notation system, an alphabet, a record of the beaver’s carving “inflections” on the tree during the felling process, or a log (conceptual pun intended), of the young beaver’s learning process. This is where the idea of creating a typographic system emerged. First, the patterns on every side of the piece of wood were traced and analyzed, which allowed the recognition of discrete toothmark patterns that were vectorized for the development and programming of the typeface. This resulted in individual glyphs that likely are the product of one or two beaver “chomps” on the surface of the wood. Through this process, the beaver’s carving became a portal to an expressive world and a speculative visual system inspired by their imprint on other bodies and, consequently, on an extended territory.
To prevent the glyphs from having a stable meaning, each discrete glyph of CASTOR has not been associated with any word, letter, or concept. Their abstract configuration is ambiguous and open-ended, and their structure may be interpreted as the path of a river, a topographic map, fur patterns, or a flock of birds on a distant horizon. When we become aware that these marks are the carvings of a beaver, they may start to look like a ‘beaver-like’ writing system.
Many artists and researchers interested in exploring multispecies entanglements engage with the creation of speculative more-than-human languages. This approach serves as a portal to understanding the existence of other languages but also how they can broaden and destabilize our human-centered viewpoints, challenging our expectations of what language can be. By understanding that writing systems are not only functional but also an expressive and creative medium, we can experience different ranges of emotions and meanings that escape the conventional registers of human communication. In alignment with this, shifting our attention towards nonhuman mark-making systems offers the opportunity for exploration of unknown knowledge territories and the possibilities to connect with other ways of being. CASTOR is a play tool; it does not pretend to offer insight into the real multi-sensorial language of beavers although it is linked to a real process essential to their lives and in the shaping of ecosystems. Rather, it is a speculative intersection that is rooted in real mark-making but has no fixed meaning or, at least, does not seem to embody what humans define as meaning. CASTOR presents a conundrum: it reveals the impulse to impose a model of human exceptionalism onto a more-than-human world, inhabited by other knowing subjects and diverse forms of intelligence while also confronting us with the possibility that some worlds may remain beyond our understanding. CASTOR challenges our expectations, offering an escape from human-centric models of meaning.
Unburdened by the weight of human connotations, this piece gives us space and freedom to play and to wander through the unexpected joy of not knowing. CASTOR is not about decoding, expanding or discovering the language of beavers but is rather about challenging our expectations about what we think communication and visual languages are and to expand into other forms of expression. It allows us to be near nonhuman world-making, to earthwork poetry, iron-rich teeth, fur, or the sound of trickling water; it beckons a playground for feeling and thinking about beaverness without it being fully available to us. How to utilize, write, or read this system remains in an unending process of elucidation and fabulation.
Given the profound influence beavers have across various territories and historical contexts, we often take for granted that we truly know everything about them. A Study of Beaverness aims to reclaim the mystery and opacity that all beings in this world have the right to. More importantly, it provides a space to challenge and unlearn the assumptions humans hold about animals. An imagined sharp-toothed typographic system might not be able to carry this difficult task alone but maybe, for a moment, it can help us envision iconographies of care, closeness, empathy, and a renewed understanding of beavers in practice: as shapers and witnesses of the world.
Credits:
The ongoing project A Study of Beaverness or Sharp-Toothed Dreams was created by Marianne Hoffmeister and is supported by the Language and Creation Center, an academic department dedicated to the development of creative and research projects, at the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Construction at the University of the Americas in Santiago, Chile. The project is being conducted in both the United States and Chile
CASTOR was conceptualized by Marianne Hoffmeister and created by Patricio González / W type Foundry in Santiago, Chile, based on the work of an anonymous beaver resident of the ancestral lands of Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Osage, and Shawnee peoples (now Frick Park, Pittsburgh US )
