In the face of widespread environmental degradation there is an urgent need for new cultural practices that bridge the divide between humans and nature. Many museums have recently foregrounded ecological approaches and perspectives through exhibitions and public programming. This project goes beyond such initiatives to consider the impact and politics of ecological thinking on fundamental museum practices, from cleaning and conservation to governance and exhibition design. The aim is to identify and cultivate radical new strategies that demonstrate how museums – always embedded in their own cultural-ecological worlds – can promote more-than-human flourishing.
Project Description
In 2022 the Rijksmuseum included a large-scale sculpture by artist Tomás Saraceno as the centrepiece of their exhibition Crawly Creatures. The sculpture – titled Gravitational solitary semi-social solitary Choreography LHS 477 – occupied an entire gallery of the exhibition, with dramatic lighting accentuating its strange yet familiar form: a vast web woven by four different species of spider, encased in a glass box. This fragile living work, which the artist makes clear is a collaboration with the spiders, focused attention on a creature that is typically marginalised or even eliminated within the museum environment. To extend this level of care and attention beyond the work itself, Saraceno asked the Rijksmuseum to pause their usual cleaning activities during the exhibition, with the use of vacuum cleaners and feather dusters limited in some public areas so that spiders inhabiting the building could ‘roam freely and weave their webs’.
By acknowledging and even celebrating the presence of arachnid life within a bastion of high culture, Saraceno captures – albeit in a small way – a wider shift currently unfolding across the museum field. This shift concerns the entanglement between humans and nature, and the role that museums and other cultural spaces can play in fostering more ecological ways of being with the more-than-human world. Research on this topic has so far focused on issues of storytelling, display, curating and representation (e.g. Cameron and Neison 2015; Davis 2020; Sutton and Robinson 2020; Jøgensen et al. 2022), where showing entanglement is the primary aim. This project aims to move beyond questions of representation and curating to consider the impact of ecological thinking on fundamental museum practices, from cleaning and conservation to governance and exhibition design. How do emerging museological practices seek to foster new relationships between humans and nature? What are the challenges and implications of such work? How might these practices help to build more just and liveable worlds in the face of social and environmental degradation?
To help clarify the shift I am interested in here let me give a few further examples. At the medical museum in Copenhagen, conservators inspired by Caitlin DeSilvey’s concept of ‘curated decay’ (2017) are exposing objects to forces and entities that are normally kept at bay in the museum: light, temperature, humidity, fungi, bacteria, moths. As the project description states, this approach asks what might happen if the museum were to ‘preserve and nurture life’ rather than simply take care of individual objects (see also Dominguez Rubio 2020). In Rotterdam, meanwhile, the Het Nieuwe Instituut recently became the world’s first Zoöp – a ‘revolutionary organisational model in which people are asked to work together towards common goals with all other forms of life’. To this end, the institute has added a representative for non-human life as an advisor and board observer. This ‘speaker for the living’ – as the museum describes the role – has ‘authority over operational matters that affect the quality of non-human life at the institute’. Artist Zheng Bo proposed something similar in 2021 during a residency at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, inviting artists, scientists, activists and gardeners to co-author a manifesto encouraging the institution to embrace a more-than-human future by channelling the voices of trees, water, bees, foxes, weeds, seasons, soil, spirits and microbes. These and other emerging initiatives around the world show how museums are already being reimagined through an ecological lens, in explicit and implicit ways.
What is at stake in this conceptual and practical reimagining? As many authors have noted, there is an urgent need for institutional reform and structural change to address the profound challenges of the ecological crisis (e.g. Demos 2020; Janes 2020). Going beyond representation and storytelling about the natural world, the projects mentioned above demonstrate some of the radical ways in which cultural actors and institutions are seeking to formulate new ways of living in and with the earth (new that is for modern capitalist societies: such approaches would be deemed unexceptional in other places and other times (see Sundberg 2014; Todd 2015)). Crucially, these initiatives do not ignore the fact many museums played a key role in generating and sustaining destructive ecological processes, but they use this understanding to advocate for fundamental change, rather than simply critique. In doing so they may offer a model for other emerging socio-environmental strategies that aim to bridge the divide between nature and culture to address institutionalised violence against the more-than-human world. Indeed, by focusing on infrastructures, policies and systems rather than simply narratives and display techniques, such proposals offer new ways of thinking about critical and creative environmental work in museums and the wider cultural sector. Crucially, this also means looking beyond the walls of the museum to consider issues of land, soil and atmosphere alongside and in conjunction with familiar museological concerns around community and inclusivity (indeed, the intersection of these themes may offer the most fruitful area of research moving forwards).
While initiatives that centre the more-than-human in cultural work clearly respond to an urgent need for more sustainable modes of practice in the climate change era, we do not have a good sense of their efficacy or their broader consequences for society. This exploratory project aims to build knowledge on such work across and between different museological contexts. While a small number of publications and initiatives have sought to ‘ecologise’ museums or develop a posthumanist perspective on such spaces (L’internationale 2016; Cameron 2018), little research has been carried out to bridge museum studies and political ecology more broadly. It is my contention that this framework can help us to understand the deeper implications of climate-related work in museums and cultural institutions: an area of research and engagement that has flourished in recent years. Such a framework would need to resonate with a diverse range of museums yet respond to specific museological contexts. Put simply, questions of care, land, injustice and entanglement will be very different for an eco-museum in the Caribbean and a science centre in Singapore. This project does not aim to document all such ecologies, but it does seek to promote a new perspective on museums-in-nature that will be applicable in diverse cultural-ecological worlds.
References
Cameron, F. and B. Neilson (eds.) 2015. Climate Change and Museum Futures. New York: Routledge
Cameron, F. 2018. Posthuman museum practices. In R. Braidotti & M. Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 349-352
Davis, J. (ed.) 2020. Museums and Climate Action [Special Issue]. Museum Management and Curatorship 35(6)
Demos, T. J. 2020. Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing. Durham: Duke University Press
DeSilvey, C., 2017. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press
Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2020. Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press
Janes, R. 2020. Museums in perilous times. Museum Management and Curatorship 35(6), 587-598
Jørgensen, D., L. Robin, M. Fojuth (eds.) 2022. Exhibiting Extinction [Special Issue]. Museum & Society 20(1)
L’Internationale (eds.) 2016. Ecologising Museums. Paris: L’Internationale
Sundberg, J. 2014. Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies 21(1), 33-47
Sutton, S. and C. Robinson (eds.) 2020. Museums and Public Climate Action [Special Issue]. Journal of Museum Education 45(1)
Todd, Z. 2015. Indigenizing the Anthropocene. In: H. Davis and E. Turpin (eds.) Art in the Anthropocene. London: Open Humanities Press, 241-254
Papadopoulos, D., M. Puig de la Bellacasa and M. Tacchetti (eds.) 2023. Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict. Bristol: Bristol University Press
This project has received funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of their Open Competition for the Social Sciences and Humanities (XS).
Colin Sterling 