In this book we encounter eleven different animals at original size, among them a fox, a beaver and a polar bear. The images are testimony and trace of a physical touch. Together with the printer Thomi Wolfensberger, the artist Michael Günzburger developed a process to lithographically capture the imprint of an animal. Every single hair becomes visible: head, body, tail — the animals appear with an unprecedented immediacy, their energy physically palpable. The lithographs enable a new view of our contradictory relationship to the creatures we admire and torment, fear and caress. Contact follows Günzburger's years-long engagement with the drawn line — the line that separates and connects, that detaches details from the whole and thereby first makes identity possible. For the first time in book form, Günzburger collaborates with the dramatist, essayist and novelist Lukas Bärfuss, with whom he is bound by a long friendship. In Contact, Bärfuss takes us on a journey out into the forests and the icy deserts of an island in the northern sea, exploring history, geography and zoology and asking after the human longing for contact with animals. The 400-page publication is also Bärfuss's first poetry publication in English. No animal was harmed.