Extinction
I have been writing this text while simultaneously deinstalling an exhibition that I co-curated with Anna-Sophie Springer for the Museum of Natural History in Halle, Germany.³ As with previous iterations of the show that appeared in Hamburg and Berlin, during deinstall I left one artwork, created by Julian Oliver and Crystelle Vu, to the last. Comprised primarily of a Chinese-made chao gong and an internet connected modem, the Extinction Gong programmatically calls the International Union for the Conversation of Nature (IUCN) List of Threatened Species in order to relay the biodiversity crisis in real time to museum visitors.⁴ When a new species is added to the list, the gong rings with a sobering, low tone as a small speaker announces the Latin name of the species that has been lost forever. Most disturbingly, the gong also rings its haunting memorial on a nineteen-minute rhythm to represent the current rate of extinction twenty-seven thousand species per year, or an average of one every nineteen minutes, according to E. O. Wilson. It is important to me that while I work, I also try to bear witness to this catastrophic event. The peculiar uniformity of the apples or almonds in your own grocery store will have to suffice as local memorials, as I now need to disconnect the gong.