A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS, A CONSORTIUM OF CRABS, A CULTURE OF BACTERIA, A LABOR OF MOLES, A BUSINESS OF FERRETS, A SIEGE OF HERONS, A CONSPIRACY OF LEMURS, A WISDOM OF WOMBATS, A PANDEMONIUM OF PARROTS
— An exhibition assemblage on multispecies worlds.
Participating artists: Sander Blomsma, Elsa Brès, Gabi Dao, Anka Helfertová, Marianne Hoffmeister Castro, Manjot Kaur, The Multispecies Collective, Jochen Lempert, Kris Lemsalu, Sonia Levy, nabbteeri, Thomas Pausz, Hanna Rullmann
Campaign image A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS by Lisa Rampilli.
Who benefits, cui bono, when species meet?
The prioritizing of humans also leads to restrictive definitions of who counts as human, and the brutalization of animals is related to the brutalization of human animals. This will be a very important arena of struggle during the coming period.
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’s clock rather than their own biological one. Following political theorist Alyssa Battistoni, could we envision “the ‘work of nature’ as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.”?
Confronting this insidious and entangled trajectory requires new ways of organising our thoughts and our material relations—our 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—and 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—an ‘assemblage’ 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—from mass extinction to climate change. What tactics do we need for—as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers calls it—to form an ‘ecology of practices’, 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.
Susan Leigh Star first suggested, “It is both more analytically interesting and more politically just to begin with the question, cui bono?, than to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/non-human mingling”: Star, “Power, Technologies, and the Phenomenology of Conventions,” 43. See also Haraway, When Species Meet.
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Angela Davis and Astra Taylor, ‘Angela Davis on the Struggle for Socialist Internationalism and a Real Democracy’, Jacobin (October 2020).
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Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital to Hybrid Labor’, Political Theory 45, no. 1 (February 2017) 5–31.
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Isabelle Stengers, ‘Introductory notes on an ecology of practices’, Cultural Studies Review 11, no. 1 (March 2005) 183–196.
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Curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk.
The RADIUS 2025 year-programme BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS, of which this exhibition is a part, has been made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund and the Municipality of Delft. We thank them all kindly for their support!