Mo Ganji: Yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey | Gelbschwanz-Wollaffe | Oreonax flavicauda | No. 249/250 from work group 8/99

Yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey | Gelbschwanz-Wollaffe | Oreonax flavicauda

Mo Ganji turns toward the yellow-tailed woolly monkey — a large arboreal primate inhabiting the cloud forests of the Peruvian Andes — by letting the single line move toward essence rather than expressiveness or kinship. The line condenses the being into a reduced coherence, setting aside movement, social presence and familiarity so that presence can surface without narrative. In Ganji’s understanding, the line does not belong to the monkey alone; it remains open, reminding us that every form is also a human concept provisionally placed upon a living continuum.

Oreonax flavicauda is listed as Critically Endangered (CR) on the IUCN Red List. Endemic to a narrow range of montane forest in northern Peru, the species was long thought extinct before being rediscovered in the 1970s. Today, its remaining populations are highly fragmented and confined to shrinking patches of cloud forest.

The principal threats include deforestation driven by agriculture, logging and road construction, as well as hunting. Because yellow-tailed woolly monkeys depend on continuous forest canopy for movement, feeding and social structure, fragmentation severely undermines survival and reproduction. Small, isolated groups face additional genetic and demographic risks.

Ganji’s single line opens a space in which the monkey can be encountered beyond rarity or rediscovery. It allows the being to be perceived as a life shaped by vertical continuity and altitude, suggesting how forms adapted to layered forest worlds become fragile once those layers are interrupted — and how disappearance often follows the quiet thinning of what once connected canopy to canopy.