Behind the Wall
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
—Jorge Luis Borges, epilogue to “The Maker” 1
Since 2013, we have been working intensely on an itinerant exhibition cycle, “Verschwindende Vermachtnisse: Die Welt als Wald,” [”Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest”], which after nearly three years of archival and field research, was presented consecutively at three German natural history museums, taking on the form of a traveling, free-to-the-public “art-science” exhibition about the legacy of the nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. 2 “Disappearing Legacies” was framed by two of the major collecting expeditions undertaken by Wallace, a younger contemporary of Charles Darwin, and his codiscoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace traveled to the Brazilian Amazon and Rio Negro from 1848 to 1852, and later to the Malay Archipelago between 1854 to 1862; he recorded many of his experiences in his best-selling book The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise-A Narrative of Travel, with Sketches of Man and Nature, first published after his return to London in 1869. As in his other publications Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses, and Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, his meticulous description of natural sites and their flora, fauna, and geomorphy enables an exceptionally fine-grained comparison with current conditions, some fifteen decades lacer. When paired with artistic intelligence and curatorial interpretation, such comparative analyses reveal the speed and scale of environmental transformation in the torrid zone. Another significant aspect of Wallace's work is the idealized illustrations of tropical nature that he sketched and then commissioned for his books, and which, in turn, inspired some of the first habitat dioramas bringing together animals and plants of a biogeographical region in three-dimensional taxidermy tableaus. 3 His role as a colonial collector and, at least to some, an early environmentalist, also made Wallace a compelling conceptual persona for an exhibition about environmental crises because be allowed us to appropriate and displace the tradition of the biographical “great-man-of-science" retrospective through interventions that connected colonial history, contemporary environmental struggles, and the scientific will to knowledge into a close constellation of concerns that could nevertheless avoid the pitfalls of didacticism and overdetermination
of the work. 4
Borrowing the formal tropes of this exhibition format, the project could go on to consider how colonial archives of nature can be mobilized, disassembled, framed, and read in ways that enable a discussion of urgent ecological and systemic questions of injustice today. We were able to invite more than eighteen international artists and activists, commission eight new installations, and work with scientific curators and scholars to select specimens, artifacts, and other archival materials pertaining co the respective institutions and their geographies. 5 Time-and object-based installations by invited artists addressed urgent contemporary issues in Brazil and Southeast Asia; these artworks were exhibited alongside a series of curatorial assemblages developed through our collections research, all of which intervened in the natural history museum displays and their respective scenographies. Overall, this constellation of exhibition components constructed a dense and multilayered array of themes, images, stories, and sounds connecting the past and the present in ever-sh if ting refractions. In this way, the exhibition celebrated both diversity and biodiversity, by challenging aesthetic and agricultural monoculcures and by interrogating the modern colonial legacies that perpetuate epistemicide
and ecocide. 6 After years of research and on-site exhibitionmaking, we were relieved when the project came to an end in December 2018. Yet, while deinstalling the final version of the exhibition in the remarkable Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen of Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg, we noriced something completely unexpected that challenged the narrative of the exhibition. During this exhibition cycle we had repeatedly described the natural history museum as a kind of “secular church” that was, following the publication of the DarwinWallace Paper on natural selection in 1858, committed to promoting the theory of evolution as a heuristic for the appreciation of nature as such. Yet, upon closer inspection while we loaded our remal trucks, we noticed that the actual church that flanked the Halle Natural History Museum and presenting by contrast a more upright architectural posture, shared an architectural element with the museum-a single, contiguous buttressed wall connecting the two while also forming a part of the building of each institution and creating a courtyard between them. It may appear as a rather prosaic observation, but this banal architectural feature created a sort of conceptual shock as we pondered just what was protected in this common courtyard. This interruption of the calm of these final moments of the exhibition cycle suggested the need for further reflection regarding both our curatorial intervention and the institutional paradigm we meant to disrupt.
In what follows, we reflect on the concepts of necroaesthetics and humiliation, which traveled and changed alongside our practice as exhibition-makers, while we also attempt to map some of the personal, methodological, and theoretical territories that they transverse in the history of natural history. While we focus on avifauna to keep a certain narrative coherence, our broader objective is co trouble the image of Nature that the natural history museum is designed to produce; the need to contest this image of Nature, which is still so readily and casually inherited-even amidst an anthropogenic, planetary mass-extinction event-is, for us, a political act. Indeed, as Razmig Keucheyan has convincingly argued in Nature is a Battlefield, “Nature is not somehow free of the power relations in society; rather, it is the most political of allentities.” 7 Understanding how images of
Nature have been conceptualized and produced by Western coloniality/modernity matters, because, again and emphatically: “Nature is not natural.” 8 In fact, as we hope to demonstrate in this essay, the image of Nature at stake in museums of natural history today is neither natural nor neutral; instead, depending on how concepts of necroaesthetics and humiliation are negotiated in and among these spaces, museums can either reinforce exterminist and colonial projects of domination or participate in decolonial practices of mulrispecies solidarity
and survival.
The Ornithologist, the Taxidermist, and
the Plume Boom
Birds of paradise were represented as ethereal and alluring inhabitants of this remote, exotic land—indeed, part of the treasure the island promised. Collectors' cabinets, oil paintings, and illustrated books worked together in depicting the birds as sublimely sensuous and beautiful. [...] The deaths of the birds and the violence involved in transforming living birds into skins and plumes were sublimated within the language and logic of fashion and science.
—Rick De Vos, "Extinction in a Distant Land" 9
In the history of natural history, birds and taxidermy share a long legacy that is indelibly connected to the colonial control of land and resources. Yet, despite rampant colonial domination, the homegrown desire to view “exotic” productions of tropical nature was difficult to satisfy because so few Europeans could afford to travel abroad; meanwhile, the specimens that were captured alive often died in transit on their way back to Europe. In this context, taxidermy became the medium through which the image of tropical nature was produced for a European audience. The early taxidermists experimented most frequently with avifauna because, as Paul Lawrence Farber, a specialist on the history of ornithology, explains:
During the eighteenth century European naturalists and collectors came to possess an enormous quantity of information and material sent back from Africa, Asia, and the New World by explorers. colonists, and professional naturalist-collectors. The resultant, expanded empirical base for natural history raised technical, theoretical, and philosophical problems, and the solutions to thest problems constituted many of the preconditions for the emergence late in the century of specialized disciplines such as ornithology. 10
Birds of paradise were represented as ethereal and alluring inhabitants of this remote, exotic land—indeed, part of the treasure the island promised. Collectors' cabinets, oil paintings, and illustrated books worked together in depicting the birds as sublimely sensuous and beautiful. [...] The deaths of the birds and the violence involved in transforming living birds into skins and plumes were sublimated within the language and logic of fashion and science.
—Rick De Vos, "Extinction in a Distant
In the history of natural history, birds and taxidermy share a long legacy that is indelibly connected to the colonial control of land and resources. Yet, despite rampant colonial domination, the homegrown desire to view “exotic” productions of tropical nature was difficult to satisfy because so few Europeans could afford to travel abroad; meanwhile, the specimens that were captured alive often died in transit on their way back to Europe. In this context, taxidermy became the medium through which the image of tropical nature was produced for a European audience. The early taxidermists experimented most frequently with avifauna because, as Paul Lawrence Farber, a specialist on the history of ornithology, explains:
During the eighteenth century European naturalists and collectors came to possess an enormous quantity of information and material sent back from Africa, Asia, and the New World by explorers. colonists, and professional naturalist-collectors. The resultant, expanded empirical base for natural history raised technical, theoretical, and philosophical problems, and the solutions to thest problems constituted many of the preconditions for the emergence late in the century of specialized disciplines such as