"Scientific expeditions were crucial to projects of colonial expansion and contributed to accruing imperial prestige. The aspiration to dominate nature was intrinsic to imperial demonstrations of power that, as evidence of their superiority, sought to conquer and tame far away landscapes inhabited by exoticized humans and non-humans. The impressive amount of ethnographic objects, plants and animals collected—or rather, amassed and appropriated—over the centuries built the foundation for natural history museums as well as botanical gardens and zoos across Europe. This panel sets to explore how imperial ecological legacies and narratives reverberate in the Capitalocene. Moving beyond imperial (hi)stories that centre on the human experience, we find it crucial to contextualize imperial trajectories in environmental destruction and violence by extending our attention to the increasingly precarious livelihoods of nonhuman actors. The panel stimulates debate on how 'nature' remembers and provides us with rich archives that may enlighten our understanding of how institutions, practices, and ethics that originated under imperialism (e.g. natural history museums, forest management, hunting rights, and animal diplomacy) still figure today." Very excited to spend two days at this workshop at MPI Göttingen organized by Annika Kirbis and colleagues and contribute with a short presentation based on exhibition-related research; more info on program and other participants below.

The third iteration of the exhibition is approaching fast! Save the date for the opening of Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest] in the Natural History Collections of Martin Luther University in Halle/Saale, which will be installed throughout the entire building—that is normally not open to the public in this way. With artworks by Maria Thereza Alves, Ari Bayuaji, Bik Van der Pol, Ursula Biemann, Shannon Lee Castleman/Migrant Ecologies, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Mark Dion, Radjawali Irendra / Akademi Drone Indonesia, Armin Linke with Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi, Barbara Marcel, Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu, PetaBencana.id, SHIMURAbros, Paulo Tavares / autonoma, Robert Zhao Renhui / The Institute of Critical Zoologists

As part of a dense program of the contemporary arts festival "The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea," organized by The Blackwood Gallery at University of Toronto/Mississauga, we are launching the first volume in the attendant three-volume book series with a conversation on “this land of forces.” The event is hosted by editors Christine Shaw, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Etienne Turpin. Seven contributors will speak about their work in the book: performance scholar Allen Weiss on the history of art as an itinerant, speculative exhibition; artist duo Pejvak on the border work of Armenian political economic realities; artist Tania Willard on Indigenous land practices born out of a lived connection to the land; and activist Tom Keefer and lawyer Adrienne Telford with D.T. Cochrane on Indigenous solidarity work and the struggle for justice.
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"The Work of Wind: Land." With contributions by Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson, d’bi.young anitafrika, Amy Balkin, Jesse Birch, D.T. Cochrane, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Anna Feigenbaum, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ilana Halperin, Tom Keefer, Barbara Marcel, Mimi Onuoha, Tomás Saraceno, Christine Shaw, Juliana Spahr, Adrienne Telford, Etienne Turpin, Allen S. Weiss, Tania Willard, and Eva Wilson. Design by Katharina Tauer.
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Edited by Christine Shaw & Etienne Turpin
English
336 pages
18.5 x 24 cm
62 Color images
Hardcover, thread-bound
ISBN 978-3-9818635-8-1
28.00 Euros

"Session on Territory" is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. In my session I will discuss a series of recent research and projects including the exhibition "Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest." Looking forward to a discussion moderated by the wonderful Dubravka Seculic.

During the final week of the exhibition, we have the privilege to host Anna Tsing for an evening lecture inside "The World as Forest" in Hamburg! Inspired by her recent travels to the Raja Ampat islands of West Papua in Indonesia, Prof. Tsing has proposed to share new reflections animated by the birdwatching she did together with foreign ornithologists and locals in "the land of the birds of paradise" as Wallace described the area. In the abstract of her talk she asks, "How might quite different kinds of people appreciate birds? And in what ways do birds appreciate (or refuse the attentions of) people?" Responding to anthropologists' worries whether studying nonhuman socialities might fall in line with Western imperial mindsets, she rejoins that "to ignore nonhumans as social beings blithely ignores Anthropocene destruction, which haunts our species too." Thus exploring "overlapping—but non-identical—forms of curiosity" and various economies at play in these birdwatching constellations, Anna Tsing will discuss the potential of "new forms of collaboration across the humanities, arts, and natural sciences: collaborations we may need to survive the Anthropocene." She suggests that "[t]o recognize the dance of more-than-human sociality requires attention both to varied agendas people have with birds and to those birds have with people." Coincidentally, in February we also just returned from a trip to these islands, with many (very) early morning hikes to special spots under special trees in thick forests. Anna Tsing's lecture "The Sociality of Birds: Reflections on Ontological Edge Effects" promises to be a memorable evening and no doubt a highlight of this first iteration of the exhibition before we will take it to Berlin (opening 26 April). [Photo: Red birds-of-paradise, Waigeo Island, Indonesia. By Yulia Bereshpolova, December 2017.]
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The event will be held in English with simultaneous German translation.
Doors of the exhibition open at 17h00.
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"Practicing Deep Time" is a two-day event focusing on Deep Time in arts and heritage: a one-day multi-disciplinary symposium based at the arts organization Timespan in Helmsdale, Northern Scotland, followed by a field day, exploring Deep Time concepts across East Sutherland and Caithness. On Friday, Timespan will host a day of talks and workshops. Here, Anna-Sophie Springer will present a keynote drawing on recent work that aims to create sustained conversations about the future of “natural history” through exhibition-led enquiry bringing together natural history collections and contemporary art. A cross-disciplinary roundtable session will consider particular issues associated with the communication and interpretation of Deep Time subjects – what methods can we employ to overcome the perceived unknowability of distant pasts and futures? Other presenters include Gavin McGregor, Nashin Mahtani, and Sam Nightingale; plus a new solo exhibition by artist Gair Dunlop and a screening of the film "Trace Evidence" (2016) by Susan Schuppli. On Saturday, participants can engage with the land through field trips dealing with the region's nuclear infrastructures, peatlands, and deep time archaeology, respectively.

Each edition of the annual Leeds artists book fair takes place under the motto of a specific theme. In 2018, this overarching theme is "The Library." The curatorial program accompanying the book fair at the Tetley Gallery includes exhibitions by Madiha Aijaz and Mahbub Jokhio as well as a new iteration of Nick Thurston's publishing studio "The House that Heals the Soul." Moreover, I was invited to give the keynote lecture on Saturday evening by drawing upon my work in Fantasies of the Library (MIT Press, 2016). Echoing the visual essay "Reading Rooms Reading Machines," I wrote a new performance lecture leading through a selection of “library fantasies” from the real world we'd do well dreaming with in 2018.

Ever since I heard Françoise Vergès speak for the first time in Berlin a couple of years ago, I've been reading her pieces with genuine excitement. Thus, I am really delighted to begin the year in Berlin after a stimulating holiday in Cambodia, Laos, and Eastern Indonesia by engaging in a conversation with Françoise Vergès at the upcoming transmediale festival "Face Value." In her keynote lecture "Politics of Forgetfulness," Vergès will discuss old and new forms of dispossession and colonization, reconnecting past, present, and future. Turning to anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist methodologies, she will highlight the need for a new politics of the possible and a politics of lives that matter. See you there! [Photo by Etienne Turpin, Vientiane/Laos, 2017]

One more time before going on holiday until the new year I will give a tour of the exhibition at CeNak. Join me at 14h00 in the foyer of the museum!

On Friday evening, I will head from CeNak to the Kunsthaus Hamburg where I was asked to respond to Tejal Shah’s current solo exhibition Unbecoming by giving a little talk on the theme “touching nature.” If you are free and nearby on Friday, would be great to see you there at 19h00!

It’s been 160 years since Alfred Russel Wallace understood the principles of species evolution in the course of his travels through Amazonia and the Malay Archipelago. From 10 November 2017 to 29 March 2018, the exhibition Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald confronts the destructions of these tropical ecosystems in the context of the Anthropocene and mass extinction. A hybrid between thematic exhibition and art exhibition, this intervention in the Zoological Museum Hamburg at Centrum für Naturkunde (CeNak), University of Hamburg, Verschwindende Vermächtnisse presents 13 contemporary works of art—including 8 new commissions—alongside a selection of rare zoological and botanical objects. We’re pleased to announce the names of the participating artists with whom it was a great honor and pleasure to work over the past year!
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Maria Thereza Alves
Ursula Biemann
Bik Van der Pol
Shannon Lee Castleman
Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen
Mark Dion
Radjawali Irendra / Akademi Drone Indonesia
Armin Linke with Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi
Barbara Marcel
Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu
Robert Zhao Renhui / The Institute of Critical Zoologists
SHIMURAbros
autonoma / Paulo Tavares
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21 November 2017, 10h00–12h00
alongside presentations by David Chambers and Etienne Turpin

The book, published by MAO and Motto Books, works to explore ways of changing the goals of design culture. By presenting the seven investigative episodes developed within BIO 25 and their interchange with both local archives and broader paradigms, the project aims to turn away from the urgent need to solve problems, and instead open up new frontiers for observation and experimentation. It seeks to consider our inhabited and habitable world for what it is and what it is becoming, and not simply what we think it should, ideally, be.

Come say hi at the new studio on the FAHRBEREITSCHAFT compound in Lichtenberg! Etienne Turpin, Wolfgang Hückel, Katharina Tauer and I will be there working and happy to have a chat about our various projects happening at the moment!

Set in a former US Navy base in Puerto Rico, Ojos para mis Enemigos [Eyes for my enemies] by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz observes how multiple introduced and indigenous species—plants and crops, but also animals, humans and not—share this terrain and together constitute a new space, offering poetic as well as very concrete scenarios of the anthropocene, its devastation but also modes of recuperation. Vdrome asked me to do a short interview with Beatriz to introduce the work. Have a read/look!

Perfectly timed for our book launch-walk in Berlin’s Tiergarten last night—which was so magical thanks to Sandra Bartoli kindly guiding us to some of the oldest trees—Jason Groves also composed a beautiful reading of intercalations 4 which he published on the Feedback Blog of Open Humanities Press. A scholar of German literature, Jason contributed some excerpts by Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel about the Tiergarten and even the Amazon on Horseback sculpture where we departed from.

Please join me and Etienne for a guided tour of the various natures of the Tiergarten—including its oldest trees—with Berlin-based architect Sandra Bartoli. During the tour, visitors will also encounter special guests Richard Pell, director of the Center for Postnatural History; Jason Groves, co-editor of the open access blog Feedback; and, Katharina Tauer, designer of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series. Dress for a walk in the park!

This international conference by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes pilot project, Art/Nature: Artistic Interventions at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin convenes a series of presentations and panel discussions to reflect on the collaboration between protagonists from the worlds of contemporary art and natural history museums. The conference addresses the expectations, potentials, values, and possible limitations of such interactions and interventions from the perspective of curators, artists, and researchers. Together with Etienne Turpin, I will present our Reassembling the Natural project in the closing session “Difficult Legacies” on 27 June. Other conference speakers include Tal Adler, Claude d’Anthenaise, Bergit Arends, Ariane Berthoin Antal, Yara Castanheira, Tony Clark, Michael John Gorman, Gaby Hartel, Petra Lange-Berndt, Janet Laurence, Susanne Schmitt, Thomas Schnalke, Barbara Stauffer, Frank Steinheimer, Ulrike Stottrop, D’Arcy Wilson, and Laurie Young.

As I am accompanying Etienne for his keynote lecture at this symposium, I feel quite flattered to have been asked to participate a little, too, by chairing a session in the morning of the second day. Presentations are by Marianna Tsionki, Alexandra Halkias, and Mark Peter Wright and deal with rare earths, toxicity, biopolitics, and infrastructure—apparently from a curatorial perspective. Excited to meet these speakers and look forward to other keynotes by Nigel Clark, Mark Dorrian, Jussi Parikka, Joanna Zylinska as well as my Ph.D. supervisor Susan Schuppli.

Following the earlier fourth (!) volume, the third volume of the intercalations: paginated exhibitions series has also arrived from the printer! Reflecting and refracting on the role of colonial science in the tropics, Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago gathers contributions by Akademi Drone Indonesia, George Beccaloni, Iwank Celenk, Lucy Davis, Fred Langford Edwards, Christina Leigh Geros, Matthias Glaubrecht, Geraldine Juárez, Radjawali Irendra, James Russell, Mark von Schlegell, SLAVE PIANOS, Anna-Sophie Springer, Zenzi Suhadi, Paulo Tavares, Rachel Thompson, Etienne Turpin, and Satrio Wicaksono, with design by Katharina Tauer. intercalations is co-published by K. Verlag and Haus der Kulturen der Welt and was made possible by the Schering Stiftung.

With a current rate of extinction estimated at over one hundred species per day, the anthropogenic extermination of non-human forms-of-life on Earth is rightly a cause of serious alarm. Such a rate of extinction is made even more troubling when one considers that with the disappearance of each species, the planet not only loses one of its constituent actors, but also greatly diminishes the processes of planetary evolution, as the potential for species’ adaptability rapidly decreases with each and every loss. Following several years of commissioned field work in the global biodiversity hotspots of Nusantara and Amazonia, as well as extensive archival research in major natural history collections, this edited volume weaves together voices and narratives, from science and documentary, to philosophy and poetry, to ask how the concept of “nature” might be meaningfully reassembled against the backdrop of mass extinction.

This year's Ph.D. seminar at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs, Paris, is focused on strategies of “publication.” Here, the main guiding questions are how to make research (in art and design) public? And how can media such as the book, the library, and the exhibition be mobilized as research tools in this process? As guest lecturer in the seminar, I was invited to respond to these questions based on some of my recent projects including Fantasies of the Library, intercalations, and Reassembling the Natural.

As a last-minute addition to the speaker's list of the symposium “On Nature, Race, and Gender: The Politics of the Contemporary Debates around Art, Culture, and Research,” I will present a speed-reading through the third and fourth volumes of intercalations. Looking forward to contribute among other presentations by Chus Martinez, Filipa Ramos, Tejal Shah, Trevor Paglen, Ingo Niermann, and Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

[Excerpt] "Fantasies of the Library is a useful book in adding to the recent art and library projects some well–articulated thoughts. It resonates with the writing done recently by such scholars as Shannon Mattern and offers a particularly artistic take on similar concerns. This comes out well in [Springer's] visual essay 'Reading Rooms Reading Machines' that moves from contemporary arts of the book and its forms of organisation to the situations where it is staged and visible, addressable and usable; from practices and technologies of reading to the imaginaries, the forms and materials of organisation knowledge that are the entry point to contemporary discussions of data and organisation. Indeed, as Springer puts it, this all reveals how the book is to be considered 'a situation and a practice,' just like the library itself."

Using the new intercalations publication, The Word for World is Still Forest, as a starting point, my second seminar at Institut Kunst in Basel will combine readings and discussions with excursions behind the scenes of the city's Tropenhaus of the Botanical Gardens, the Museum der Kulturen, and the Natural History Museum. Traversing through the archives of institutions that collect natural and cultural material—books, artworks, artifacts, and scientific specimens—we will reflect on how these institutions organize what is considered knowledge and explore strategies and practices with which we can activate and connect these spaces in ways in which they are not normally viewed by dominant, colonial cultures. The seminar is an introduction to applied critical thinking with a focus on more-than-human entanglements and ecological urgencies of our times.

in the publication "it's a book..." accompanying the Leipzig Independent Publishing Fair 2017 organized by Peter Cornicius, Anne Dietzsch, Michael Dikta, Markus Dreßen, Albrecht Gäbel, and Jenny Schreiter. With my thanks to Inga Seidler.

In 2017, HKW und K. Verlag continue their collaboration within this six-part publication series with two volumes: "Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago" reflects on the changing role of colonial natural history collections in the current ecological crisis; "The Word for World Is Still Forest" is an homage to the forest as a turbulent, interconnected, multinature. The series is made possible by the Schering Stiftung.

in Exercises in Autonomy, ed. Joanna Sokolowska. Lodz: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2017. 164–78 (Polish & English).

A lovely little review of Fantasties of the Library (MIT Press, 2016), edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, by Gill Partington in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 January 2017: 33.

as part of the workshop "A Year without a Winter: Fictions and Policy." Considering how creative interventions can unlock new ways of thinking about our relationship to the environment and our political agency within it, the workshop interrogates new narratives of climate and climate change emerging in the context of the arts and transdisciplinary scholarship. As an invited speaker in the Roundtable "Curating Environmental Imaginaries," I will introduce some of the core concerns and strategies of "Reassembling the Natural." Also presenting at this Roundtable are Ken Eklund, Jacob Lillemose, and Carolina Sobecka.

where we will critically interrogate books, exhibitions, archives, and collections, attending to how they record and disseminate knowledge, experimenting along the way with traversals, shape-shifting, fact and fiction.

that explores contemporary environmental issues of Amazonia as well as its role for the planet's ecological balance with interlocutors from the arts, humanities, biology, ecology, and natural sciences. My journey to Manaus (as well as thereafter to Sao Paulo) is generously funded by a Goethe-Institut Research Travel Grant for Curators.

in response to Isabell Lorey & David Lyon’s “Anxious to Secure” keynote session at transmediale 2016 for the “Anxious to Organize” blog

L'internationals Online, No. 3 "Ecologising Museums," July 2016.

Stedelijk Studies, No. 04 "Between the Immersive and the Discursive: Curating Research in 21st-Century Art Museums," July 2016.

as part of the series "Library Residencies"

as part of the exhibition "Emergent Ecologies: NYC Edition"
curated by Eben Kirksey and others

—Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin in conversation with Daisy Nam

as part of the curatorial lab "Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions" organized by Vincent Normand & Tristan Garcia

as part of the Art, Culture, and Technology program's Spring 2016 Lecture Series, "Agencies & Urgencies"

in Publishing as Artistic Practice, edited by A. Gilbert. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. 134–52.

for the Anthropocene Curriculum,
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

as part of the exhibition "Emergent Ecologies"
curated by Eben Kirksey and others

in response to Dr Paulo Tavares in the Visual Culture Department's 10th-anniversary lecture series, "Permissions: The Way We Work Now"

"I went over this book again and again: It’s such a rich read about the power of the library, in history or contemporary, institutionalized, private or revolutionary (for example Occupy, Gezi Park). This book makes clear that the library’s power lies not only in being a container of knowledge, but in the experiences and connections it creates amongst its users. Drawing on intriguing examples, the authors discuss the implications of spatial arrangements, the politics of collecting and cataloging, as well as accessibility. Most of all, it brings back to mind a revolutionary function of the library today: “it turns marketable goods into public goods.”

As part of the 2015 gathering of the SYNAPSE International Curators' Network of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, together with Etienne Turpin I organized the workshop Little Birds / Little Machines, which included a visit to the Ornithological collection of the Museum für Naturkunde for a presentation by ornithologists Sylke Frahnert and Frank Steinheimer on elements of the collection for further development in the annals of minor ornithology (forthcoming in intercalations 06—These Birds of Temptation).

When we found out that we were both working on books "about trees," Katie Holten and I decided that we must trade pieces: She published an excerpted chapter from Fantasies of the Library in her amazing anthology About Trees while I included her Tree font in The Word for World is Still Forest.

A SYNAPSE member since 2013, I am very excited that the Haus der Kulturen der Welt has invited me to produce a series of blog texts in the months surrounding the upcoming exhibition APE CULTURE and the 2015 SYNAPSE workshop in July.

An older essay on fluid cartographies that I still enjoy very much and which ends with these words: