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= Monksy =

Monksy is an anonymous performance artist based in The Hague famous for his "Monksy project" realized in 2018 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague for four days in March.

The Monksy Project
The project consists of a story about a monkey finding herself in a urban environment and trying to adapt to the new habitat applying a human behaviour. Doing so, she mocks what people do by watching them conduct different tasks in a city - like riding a bike, wearing brand clothes, buying groceries - but in an uneffective because she does not understand human rules. The whole project is a critique to human urban environment, touching topics like consumerism, unawareness of the environment, capitalism and politics systems.

Performances
The artist performs in the city by wearing a monkey mask and walking around the city acting like a human being, interacting with people and reflecting on society trends and behaviours. The output is a short of 2'15 '' with a main scene showing Monksy walking down a city center road and reflecting on society's characters and different various scenes of Monksy performing human-like behaviours.

Monksy Identity
Monksy's identity is unknown, some theories claim it is a collective, some claim it is an individual. It is evident that her/his work has been influenced by Banksy's career.

Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art
The exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in The hague lasted four days only, and the artist itself took part of it extending the story of the monkey trying to be human. The curators of the exhibition, Jung Hyun Kim and Leonardo Scarin, gave a lecture the last day of the exhibition, when also the premiere of "The Monksy Project" documentary happened.

Documentary
The Monksy Project documentary is a short video showing all of Monksy performances in the city, associated to a long monologue that the monkey gives about his reaction to urban environment and society. At the end of the video the speech glitches and the narrator keeps repeating the same words in loop ("[Humans] they have better leaderships, they have rules and they invented money") marking the positive side of leaderships, rules and money in a built society but also criticizing the other side of it, by showing leaderships, rules and money causes that went bad.The documentary is 4 minutes long and didn't win any award, yet.

Curiosities
The animal specialist Dr. Dick Teske from Cambridge University argued that Monksy is a real monkey that incredibly developed well. According to Dick, in the documentary ‘Monksy Project’ 2017, while he was walking on the street, he was subtly showing the gesture that south African Monkey typically make while they are walking. Dick claims that Monksy could not escape. There has been a controversy that Monksy is criticizing the poor management status of current zoos. The statistics ‘Animals escaped from zoo’ shows that Comparing to 2016, the percentage of animal escaped from zoo has drastically raised (27% -> 69%). The incident took place on 21th of May 2017 is highly reminding of the scene in Monksy’s document. A Monkey escaped from zoo and went H&M to get his clothes and went grocery shop to get food, which is similarly depicted in his documentary.