Science Fiction and Surrealism: Re-Imag(in)ing Landscape for Interspecies Connection
A Curation Portfolio
On the ethics of using animals in contemporary art, Anthony Cross argues that some works have the value of attempting to create a relationship of empathy and respect for animals we would otherwise encounter with an “utter lack of attention or awareness.” The examples he uses to justify this, raise concerning questions on the space, both cognitive and physical, the freedom as it were, we allow non-human beings to evolve in. What kind of respect can be created by placing animals in blenders, or large white rooms, for products commissioned by and for the enjoyment of anthropocentric, anthropophilic ideals of art? In Staying With the Trouble, Donna Haraway highlights the big failure of our time as our inability to “live-with” and “die-with” the non-human beings (critters) who make up our vital surroundings. In the same breath she defines the Chtulucene, a new model for interspecies-based society, and Science Fiction - the combination of “science fact” and “speculative fabulation” - a tool to imagine this new world.
This exhibition will look at works that warp landscape through fabulation, speculative or critical, to reshape the place of the human in the global ecosystem. The surrealist Max Ernst best illustrates this concept, representing Surrealism, a movement that so focused on uncovering the unconscious and the points of permeation between dream and reality. His landscapes, especially, merging organic material, living beings and mineral formations such as Day and Night or Epiphany, imagine a world full of happening and fluctuation, a living breathing organism. Drawing on literature by alchemists and mathematicians, Ernst invents universes of alternative communication, elmusive communion, between the forms populating our world. Mundus Est Fabula (The World is a Story) speaks particularly to the core of this exhibition: as if looking through a microscope, mineral flakes seem to harbor a poliphony of living hosts, the golden multitude of life ongoing. This attention and reverence for both the singular sparkling detail and the plurality and complexity of life is perhaps where our new interspecies community can begin. In this landscape of burgeoning mass.
Ernst’s work will stand alongside the works of artists who shape the concept of alternative, fabulative landscape: Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keaffe and Katharina Grosse. The exhibition plan is as follows: three consecutive rooms on the permanent exhibitions floor at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In the middle of the first room towers Maman by Louise Bourgeois, surrounded by Day and Night, Epiphany and Mundus Est Fabula. On the walls in the second room: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Spring (1948), The Black Place (1943) and on the opposite wall, Black Iris (1926). On the floor, two sculptures by Smith, Born (2002) and Hoarfrost With Rabbit (2014). The last room is Katharina Grosse’s labyrinth-like installation Inside the Speaker (2015).
Scale is an important element here. In the first room it overwhelms the visitor with the possibilities of extra-human life: the focus falls on this gargantuan spider among hills, crevaces and formations of organic matter. In the second room, life-size animals run free in bronze and aluminum. Wild debris is scattered on the walls: antlers, blown up flowers and flesh colored mounds of earth. In the middle of the room, a silent natality scene. The great calm of this room strongly contrasts the urgency of the first one but echoes the idea of interspecies maternity. Bourgeois’ Maman and Smith’s Born visualize the interspecies kinships possible under the Chtulucene. On the walls, O’Keeffe’s canvases meld together all kinds of life into bright landscapes. Inspired by scenes of the American Southwest, they may remind us of the great searches for gold, the dream of settlement and community that would lead to our current Anthropocene. O’Keeffe proposes an alternative ending. The last room is Katharina Grosse’s Inside the Speaker. Literally immersed in a new world, the visitor is caught in a tornado of colors and textures, transported elsewhere. The rock formations are reminiscent of interplanetary explorations, and the bright colors of science fiction illustrations. Grosse presents us a clean slate, a do-over, a construction site for a new ecosystem.
Each of these pieces thematically transform the genre of the landscape while simultaneously altering the physical space of the gallery, the visitor’s direct surroundings. This exhibition gives the visitor the gift of imagination, of immediate fabulation of hope and awe. It is not a commentary of our failures but rather an exploration of our own fantasies of cohabitation in, and creation of, re-imagined landscapes, re-imaged interspecies connections.