Mo Ganji: Poitou Donkey | Poitou-Esel | Equus asinus | No. 161/250 from work group 8/99

Mo Ganji considers the Poitou donkey — a large, heavily built domesticated donkey breed shaped by agricultural landscapes — through a line that seeks essence rather than function. The continuous line concentrates the being into a quiet presence, enough to acknowledge life while remaining open to meanings beyond labor, breed or utility. In this stripping back, form appears before role or historical use defines it.

Equus asinus is not assessed on the IUCN Red List, as the framework applies only to wild species. Domesticated animals and their breeds fall outside this system, even when their populations are small or declining. The Poitou donkey, once widely used in rural France, experienced a severe decline with agricultural mechanization and survives today primarily through targeted breeding and cultural preservation efforts.

The principal pressures facing the breed include loss of traditional use, reduced breeding populations, and genetic narrowing. Conservation relies less on ecological protection than on human choice: maintaining breeding programs, safeguarding genetic diversity, and sustaining the cultural contexts in which the breed continues to exist.

Ganji’s single line opens a space in which the donkey can be encountered beyond service or heritage. It allows attention to rest on a life long intertwined with human hands, suggesting that dependence does not remove a being from nature, but instead exposes how responsibility replaces wilderness when survival is no longer self-sustained.