Beyond The Limits: Chapter 1
We live amid accelerating social inequality and ecological breakdown, with the rapid depletion of life forms and unprecedented biodiversity loss being historicised before our eyes. At the root we find anthropogenic climate change, driven by an ongoing objectification of our living environment advanced through capitalism, manifesting itself as a feedback loop of destruction that casts its shadow far into the future. Capitalism turns bodies into machines, reproducing itself by coercing and commodifying the reproduction of human and non-human animals. In that, humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm, working and breeding on the market鈥檚 clock rather than their own biological one. Following political theorist Alyssa Battistoni, could we envision 鈥渢he 鈥榳ork of nature鈥� as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.鈥�?
Confronting this insidious and entangled trajectory requires new ways of organising our thoughts and our material relations鈥攐ur ideologies, economies, and ecologies. In so thinking, this multispecies exhibition assemblage argues that it is time for a new kind of political balance of power, one that reevaluates, recomposes and even intrudes the conventional human-animal dialogic focus, to its recovery in the key of multispecies worlds鈥攁nd its multitude of lively agents and entangled relations. In that sense this exhibition assemblage is not meant as a mere representational and metaphorical exercise, but rather as something actual and felt, concerning the world that is actually lived by us鈥攁n 鈥榓ssemblage鈥� understood here as an open-ended gathering. Through the work of thirteen artists, collectives and advocacy groups, this exhibition looks into the possibilities of broadening the scope of inter-species relations and multispecies worlding, to underscore notions of becoming-with and response-ability.
This exhibition thus places the living at the centre of the collective field of attention, that while we, as humans, in our cultural self-image do not see ourselves as living beings and thus put ourselves outside of the equation. Only-human stories will not serve anyone in a period shaped by escalating and mutually reinforcing processes of biosocial destruction鈥攆rom mass extinction to climate change. What tactics do we need for鈥攁s philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers calls it鈥攖o form an 鈥榚cology of practices鈥�, in which multi-sensory embodied knowledge and care becomes part of our relationship to the multifarious and multispecies living environment again? This exhibition proposes five of such practices towards a multispecies ecological thought and practice, through an equal number of templates: a parliament, a union, a common room for a common world, a network, and an assembly around a fountain in the garden that used to be a graveyard. Eventually this exhibition assemblage is imagined to serve as an assembler that links the living and the inert while being both, one that serves as a basis to explicate the social and the material, beyond the realm of the formal, and that leads us back to being animals.
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We live amid accelerating social inequality and ecological breakdown, with the rapid depletion of life forms and unprecedented biodiversity loss being historicised before our eyes. At the root we find anthropogenic climate change, driven by an ongoing objectification of our living environment advanced through capitalism, manifesting itself as a feedback loop of destruction that casts its shadow far into the future. Capitalism turns bodies into machines, reproducing itself by coercing and commodifying the reproduction of human and non-human animals. In that, humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm, working and breeding on the market鈥檚 clock rather than their own biological one. Following political theorist Alyssa Battistoni, could we envision 鈥渢he 鈥榳ork of nature鈥� as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.鈥�?
Confronting this insidious and entangled trajectory requires new ways of organising our thoughts and our material relations鈥攐ur ideologies, economies, and ecologies. In so thinking, this multispecies exhibition assemblage argues that it is time for a new kind of political balance of power, one that reevaluates, recomposes and even intrudes the conventional human-animal dialogic focus, to its recovery in the key of multispecies worlds鈥攁nd its multitude of lively agents and entangled relations. In that sense this exhibition assemblage is not meant as a mere representational and metaphorical exercise, but rather as something actual and felt, concerning the world that is actually lived by us鈥攁n 鈥榓ssemblage鈥� understood here as an open-ended gathering. Through the work of thirteen artists, collectives and advocacy groups, this exhibition looks into the possibilities of broadening the scope of inter-species relations and multispecies worlding, to underscore notions of becoming-with and response-ability.
This exhibition thus places the living at the centre of the collective field of attention, that while we, as humans, in our cultural self-image do not see ourselves as living beings and thus put ourselves outside of the equation. Only-human stories will not serve anyone in a period shaped by escalating and mutually reinforcing processes of biosocial destruction鈥攆rom mass extinction to climate change. What tactics do we need for鈥攁s philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers calls it鈥攖o form an 鈥榚cology of practices鈥�, in which multi-sensory embodied knowledge and care becomes part of our relationship to the multifarious and multispecies living environment again? This exhibition proposes five of such practices towards a multispecies ecological thought and practice, through an equal number of templates: a parliament, a union, a common room for a common world, a network, and an assembly around a fountain in the garden that used to be a graveyard. Eventually this exhibition assemblage is imagined to serve as an assembler that links the living and the inert while being both, one that serves as a basis to explicate the social and the material, beyond the realm of the formal, and that leads us back to being animals.
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