Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities, 29 October 2025, 12.15-14.00
OCEH Lab, 4th floor, P.A. Munchs hus, University of Oslo
This talk explores the emergence and impact of multispecies thinking and practice in contemporary Amsterdam museums. My point of departure for the talk will be the oldest purpose-built museum in the city: ARTIS-Groote Museum. Originally constructed between 1850 and 1855 to house the collections of the Natura Artis Magistra Zoological Society, the museum closed in 1947, its collections distributed to other institutions across the Netherlands. The museum re-opened in 2022 with a display that explicitly aims to decentre humans and highlight the threads connecting all living things in the web of life. While ostensibly subverting modern frameworks that divide nature and culture, I want to argue that the historical formation and recent redesign of the ARTIS-Groote Museum in fact speaks to the contradictions implicit in thinking “ecologically” through museums. In particular, I am interested in the problem of undoing or even repairing the ruptures caused by certain museological imaginaries through longstanding colonial infrastructures. To this end, the talk will focus on a small display of tree trunks in the basement of the museum, titled Pillars of Life. These trunks are exhibited as an example of the foundation piles on which the museum – and much of the city of Amsterdam – rests. Increasingly such foundations are being undermined by climate change, as prolonged periods of dry weather have caused the city’s water table to drop, leading some piles to dry out and disintegrate. Closing the gap between the museum’s modern Enlightenment origins and its current status as a space of multispecies encounter, this talk critically examines the multiple injustices sedimented into modern cultural infrastructures.
Further details on the OCEH Website
Colin Sterling 