“In my opinion, it [the furry fandom cult] is super-innocent,” says Dutch artist and filmmaker Valentina Gal, whose new work about furry fandom The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Furry is screening in Oberhausen. “They’re not a weird group of people. It is really serious what they do.”

The short film can be seen as a companion piece to Gal’s graduation work Best Of Breed, which focused on the dog show world, in which she explored the idea that the competing dogs become the equivalent of “living sculptures.” 

Gal cites video artists Cécile B. Evans and Hito Steyerl as key influences on her work which often examines the blurring of lines between the physical and digital worlds.

“Somehow I stumbled on furry fandom,” Gal remembers. She decided to make a work highlighting the “struggles that furries have.” Participants make their own costumes and create personas which are physical or virtual alter egos of their usual selves.

To outsiders, the “furries” may seem deeply eccentric but Gal suggests “they are very spiritual in a way.” In their world, gender play no part.

“A suit is very expensive to make and it’s also very hot. You can’t work freely in them,” Gal suggests of why increasing numbers of “furries” are creating online identities rather than embracing their furry side in the physical world. 

As part of her own research, Gal created her own Virtual Reality furry persona. “I was half wolf and half dragon,” she explains. “With VR, it’s almost realer than real. When you are wearing a [furry] suit, you are aware that you are wearing a suit but with VR, if you’re wearing the glasses, you look down and you see your hairy belly and hairy hands. You can really distance yourself from the real.”

The furry world is a very secretive one. Members are conscious that outsiders may try to tease, bully and ridicule them. That was why Gal had to fight so hard to gain the furries’ approval. Furry Facebook groups had strict rules about not talking to the press and blocking outsiders whose motives they doubted.

“It was really about trust and slowly telling them what I was going to do,” she says of how she won the furries over. She explained she was new to furry fandom and asked for their help in “customising” her character.

The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Furry was exhibited late last year as part of a solo exhibition of Gal’s work last year called ‘Cracks Of Deviancy’ at the Corrosia Theatre in Almere in the Netherlands. It also showed as part of a show at the Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam.

Now, the project will be shown to film audiences in International Competition at the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen (1-10 May) happening online this year.

“Mostly, as an artist, I work on video installations. I prefer that over an online screening because the viewer can temporarily be part of a subculture that they know nothing of - they become part of that world and escape reality in a way. With an online screening, that magic isn’t there.”

Gal lives close to Oberhausen, just a 30 to 40-minute drive across the border into Germany but won’t be able to attend in person because of Covid restrictions. However, she is preparing to participate in discussions via Zoom. And, no, she won’t be in a furry costume for the online event.