Nonja (Vienna)

Nonja (* April 21, 1976 in Vienna) is an orang -utan females of the Vienna Tiergarten Schönbrunn, the celebrity has achieved because it paints pictures, and because photographs that it has made ​​with a digital camera, can be visited on the Internet. It is the world's first monkey, for a user account has been set up on Facebook.

Biography and attempts at painting

Nonja was born at the zoo. She grew up there with her mother, but was also raised by a zookeeper. Employees of the zoo offered Nonja that was still living without a partner in their enclosure, in the ordinary course employment program for apes brushes, paints and paper and time coupled successful actions with rewards for the monkeys. In the presence of zookeeper weekly painting sessions were held. Nonja showed how the press reported, an individual preference, color splashing across the paper. The painting lessons ended when Nonja with the orangutan males Vladimir (born 1974, in 1988 moved from Moscow to Amsterdam, lives since June 18, 1991 in Vienna) in 1998 was merged. Nonja has produced more than 250 paintings. A lover has paid for one of them 28,000 shillings ( about 2000 euros ).

The discovery of the art

The photography project was born out of a marketing idea of ​​company Samsung, which had developed a Facebook -compatible camera. This should be as easy to use, " that it creates each monkey ." The special camera that was famously used by Nonja as a toy and projectile, was surrounded by a thick protective shell.

It produced for the monkey as an incentive for taking pictures, by allowing automatically jump every time a raisin out of the camera if it had been pressed.

Nonja interested himself not for the photographs, leaving the camera to some extent their own species in the enclosure, two other orangutan females and the orangutan males Vladimir, as a toy.

Cult to Nonja

The "Café Nonja " in the Schönbrunn Tiergarten, which also houses the paintings of the female monkeys are issued, is also named after this. On Nonjas Facebook page more than 50,000 people are listed as her friends towards the end of 2009. The users were directed there to a large extent with rapturous comments directly to Nonja.

According to statements by the spokesman of Samsung, the plan is " a complete success " by the considerable media attention, while the zoo for its employees received a donation for his monkey house and the keepers were happy to have the monkey house over a new toy.