Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki

Tyler Kolmansberger and Mia Pugay
6 days ago
2 min read

2 Lizards (2020)

Animated lizard characters composited into a real New York setting, representing intimacy, isolation, and companionship during the COVID-19 pandemic

Close Looking: Queer African Art and Intimacy

Visual description:

2 Lizards is a multi-episode animated film documenting life in New York City during the early months of the COVID-19 shutdown. The artists cast themselves as a pair of lizards, following the couple through the loneliness, absurdity, and intimate routines that shaped pandemic life.

One of the film’s most striking choices is its visual style. The lizards are cartoonish and loosely animated, placed into mostly real-life settings. At times, they are joined by friends and strangers from the city, who appear as different kinds of animals. This rough, hybrid look gives the film a handmade and deliberately strange quality, balancing humor with emotional sharpness.

Context:

The film was created during the COVID-19 pandemic by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, who were born in Morocco and Israel, respectively, and now live in New York City. It first appeared as a series of episodic Instagram posts on Bennani’s account before later being presented as a single work.

Across its episodes, the film traces key moments of 2020, from the shock of lockdown to the rise of Black Lives Matter protests in the summer. It captures not only isolation, but also the social and political atmosphere of the period.

Interpretation:

The overall tone of the film is bittersweet, especially for viewers who lived through the pandemic. Themes of loneliness, boredom, and confinement are central, but they are balanced by the tenderness and companionship shared between the two lizards. Their relationship becomes a source of warmth and continuity within a world that feels unstable.

The decision to leave the couple’s gender expression relatively open also matters. It creates space to think about intimacy outside more traditional gender roles, especially in a moment when normal social structures had been suspended or disrupted.

The film also foregrounds race and politics. News coverage, protest, and conversations about performative allyship appear alongside the quieter scenes of daily life. These moments suggest that intimacy does not exist outside history or social conflict. Instead, the film shows how private relationships continue to unfold within larger systems of inequality and resistance.

The use of animals rather than human figures adds to this effect. It creates distance, but also freedom. The animal forms make the film playful and surreal, while allowing the artists to explore vulnerability, social roles, and emotional life in a more flexible way.

Reflect and Explore

How does the film’s minimalist visual style shape your experience of its themes? Does it distract from them, or reinforce them?
Why might the artists have chosen two lizards to represent the couple at the center of the film?
How does isolation affect the way people present themselves to one another?
What changes when the story is told through animals instead of humans?