Capitalo, Chthulu and a Much Hotter Compost Pile

“The unfinished Chthulucene must suck up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping, shredding, and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still-possible pasts, presents and futures.”1

The current moment is marked not by an ecological crisis as a temporary state of emergency, but by an irreversible mutation of the global climate and the habitability of planet Earth.2 It is a process driven by environmental pollution, ocean acidification, resource extraction, the burning of fossil fuels, agrochemical industries, and warfare, to list but a few of the anthropogenic ⎯ that is to say, human-made, factors. The term Anthropocene is commonly used to describe this very situation, giving name to a new geological epoch, defined by significant human impact on biospheric stability and geological strata.

But the term Antropocene is not undisputed. It places humanity as a whole as a singular geological agent, rendering invisible the structural responsibility of neoliberal financial elites and corporations. The Capitalocene, a concept examined for example by T.J. Demos,3 draws attention to global financial systems, highlighting the climatic impact of the capitalist political economy. Being aware of the biophysical costs of capitalism and its unequal distribution of human and ecological expenses, the current debate concerning how to think about humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity is a core theme of this exhibition.

The anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, inherent in the notion of the Anthropocene, as well as the violent reinforcement of the nature-human divide that has marked western modern history, undermine attempts to think environmental strategies that are neither disengaged nor patronizing. Several works in this exhibition question and reflect on the symbolic and material separation of nature and human, for behind the naturalization of this binary lies an imperialist discourse that has not only promoted the transformation of landscapes with the single purpose of capital accumulation, but also a long history of racialized, gendered, and colonial violence.

With the aim of overcoming catastrophist and game-over discourses, the Chthulucene proposal, brought into play by Donna Haraway, advocates for a space-time of multi-species interactions and generative collaborations in a damaged world.4 This world, however, is inhabited by the so-called chthonic ones, that is earthly or subterranean creatures, inspired by mythologies and cultual practices of diverse origins as well as factual and biological realities. While the Capitalocene allows for an extended criticism, the Chthulucene refers to a kind of storytelling with strong bonds to speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact and speculative feminism, that aims at creating more livable stories in unexpected company.

In an attempt to reject essentialist propositions and engage with postcolonial ecological thought, Capitalo, Chthulu, and a Much Hotter Compost Pile shows artistic positions that consider alternative ontological politics, reflect on environmental questions and speculate on possible narrations for our precarious times. These are stories of life (and non-life) told from the other side, to rethink how humans can fit, co-belong, co-produce, co-weave and com-post within this web of life.

1. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016, p. 57.
2. See Bruno Latour, Kampf um Gaia, Berlin, 2017, p. 22.
3. See T.J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene, 2017.
4. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016.

Michael E. Smith

Untitled, 2015
2-channel video installation, 4:3, colour, sound, loop
Left: 3:44 min and right: 0:45 min

Untitled, 2017
Vinyl rendering of CT image
22 x 27.5 x 42 cm

Untitled, 2017
Vinyl rendering of CT image
22 x 30 x 40 cm

Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

In Smith’s two-channel video work, two cockatoos star as the main characters, communicating through sound and movement in a domestic setting. Cockatoos are parrots of Australasian origin with a mostly white, grey, yellowish or pink-coloured plumage and a crest, that is either blown up or laid down according to the bird’s mood.

But the imagery of Smith is not to be understood as a sort of documentary. As aesthetic images, they have the capacity to suspend the theoretical and practical routines of our everyday relation with—and orientation within—the world, as Juliane Rebentisch might say it. With his habit of not titling his works, Smith opens up the context of his imagery to a number of possible interrelations. The found footage in his untitled two-channel video installation breaks out of the plain surface of the ordinary to present itself as a strange or even dubious occurrence.

The two objects placed on the floor are vinyl renderings of CAT-scans of dog heads. A CAT-scan is a specific X-ray test that produces cross sectional images of the body. The two sculptures thus reference contemporary imaging techniques both in terms of how the image data was produced as in how it was transformed into a sculpture. Likewise, it reminds of the presence of animals in all kinds of different laboratories, as well as the extension of human medicine to non-human companion species and livestock.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Ziggy and the Starfish, 2016
HD-video, 16 min

Documentary about Ziggy and the Starfish
HD-video, 21 min

Robotic Waste Crab, 2016
Motor, mechanics, garbage, 17 cm x 90cm x 180 cm

Singing Stones, 2017
Fossils, stones, engines, 56 cm x 49 cm

Jordan’s Ziggy and the Starfish comprises a mechanical waste-processing crab, a video work focusing on fish erotica, interviews with marine experts, and a stone-based sound installation.

By focusing on aquatic life, Jordan creates a multimedia environment exploring an alienate universe full of strangeness, mutation and adaptation. Pollution through traffic, oil drillings and oil spills, but also deforestation, urbanization and overfishing have brought the oceans to the verge of collapse. An almost invisible — yet undeniable — change in the ecology and sexual behaviour of marine life is occurring.

Meanwhile, a mechanical crab collects the garbage from the ocean and eats it. After approximately 6 cycles, with Sisyphean effort, the crab throws the waste via a catapult and starts anew. A sound installation comprises stone fossils and neo-minerals dating back 65 million years to the last extinction. Jordan’s geological mementos become inanimate cyborgs humming a song from the past to a present’s audience.

Anaïs Senli

Fire Point, 2018
HD video looped, 7’40 min., stereo sound, burnt branches, carpet, sand, pigment, fluorescent paint
Sound: Didio Pestana

The projected images could come from a non-terrestrial landscape, a fictional place, apparently inert, with rare and subtle movements occurring only from time to time. Structures are dispersed on the ground reminding of uncanny geological or organic formations, residue of burnt vegetation. The video then guides the viewer to a more recognizable place: the remnants of a burnt forest.

The images of the burnt forest and the sound of the cicadas were both recorded in Andratx, Majorca, after a forest fire in 2013, whereas the branches on the ground were taken from a burnt forest near Barcelona in 2018. Spain is one of the countries with the highest number of forest fires in Europe, almost all of them caused by human activity. However, there is little effective regulation for this problem. Public resources continue to be allocated primarily to active firefighting, neglecting detection and prevention. Though especially severe in Spain, other Mediterranean countries in the European Union suffer equally under such circumstances. Still, on the level of the European Union, the common Community Forestry Policy is incomplete and uncoordinated.

The debate around the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene in particular has highlighted the impact of colonial and industrial activities on ecosystems all around the planet. Fire Point departs from one of many cases, reflecting on the importance of a more sustainable environment and healthy forests. Emphasizing the planet’s strangeness and the feeling of desolation, Fire Point simultaneously intends to bring to mind the need to find collaborative strategies that help us to live in a world that is becoming unrecognizable.

Madison Bycroft

In Praise of Ignorance: Taxonomy Table, 2016
Wood, paint, chalk, fired and unfired stoneware, plaster, concrete, steel, plastic pipe, rope
Dimensions variable

Chthonigoegigoog or speculative artefacts for invocation and measurement, 2016
print on silk, different materials
Dimensions variable

The Bunyip is a creature referenced by many Indigenous Australian peoples, that dwelled in swamps, billabongs, riverbeds, creeks and water holes. When British settlers began to describe and classify the flora and fauna of Australia they followed a standardised, scientific procedure that privileged only what they themselves saw. Singular, white, colonial vision and epistemologies formed the basis of a knowledge with an ontological hierarchy that discredited anything outside of that. In Praise of Ignorance: Taxonomy Table is an attempt for a different kind of classification. How might we imagine or decolonise our imagination in regards to the unsaid, unseen creature. Fragments of text are written in chalk on a black, stage-like platform. Sculptural elements are variously connected by ropes, tubes, rods, pipes and ducts, provoking thoughts about an overarching ecological principle of the interconnectedness of all beings.

“Chthonic” means “in, under or beneath the earth” but also “subterranean”. Madison Bycroft’s Chthonigoegigoog or speculative artefacts for invocation and measurement operates with this lexical root and presents artefacts which are to be understood as suggestions and forms of speculation.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Séances with Extinct Species of Birds, 2012-ongoing
Sound, score
Dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm

Since 2012, the artist has conducted spiritualist sessions to establish contact with extinct species of birds. As an exercise in imagination and cross border communication, the participants experimented with their voices and breathing to reach an alternate state of receptivity. While there exists no visual documentation of the sessions, the collective process manifested in a sound work and a score similar to an arrangement of linguistic elements as known from concrete poetry. Séances with Extinct Species of Birds contemplates on species extinction, sonancy and transcendence through engaging with a performative, ritualistic practice outside the scope of modern traditions.

Born in Guatemala, Ramírez-Figueroa often picks up on the ciphers of a tropical flora and fauna. The political history of the country as well as the cultural legacy of Latin America equally tend to influence the thematic reflections of is oeuvre, which bears similarities with surrealism, theatre and notions of the spiritual in dialogue with contemporary culture.

GeoVanna Gonzalez

HOW TO: Lean Forward, Test Solutions, 2018
Mixed media
Dimensions variable

Gonzalez’ practice explores the influence of both the organic and the technological in currently shifting notions of gender and identity. She infuses the dominant virtual-visual realm back into the haptic-human world, as a way of investigating different and deeper ways of seeing through, being in, and altering the environment.

The installation is part of a series called HOW TO, which runs concurrent to the online poetry collection tutorials (www.tutorials.fyi) by Martin Jackson for which Gonzalez is making work as a way of open source translation, and versioning, or reappropriating the ideas, imagery and language of poetry.

HOW TO: Lean Forward, Test Solutions immerses the viewer in an interactive scenario. The segmented landscape explores how aesthetics can be used as a strategy for survival in our local and global environments through simulation, adaptations and or camouflaging. For example, the branded water bottles that appear throughout the installation are used as a source of growth; presented as sculptural objects as well as a subject in her video piece. The piece is intended as a form of speculative reimagining or fictionalizing our experience of the world that prompts the viewer to draw connections between these glimpses from an alternate reality and the looping words of the poem itself.

Regina de Miguel

Decepción, 2017
HD video, colour, sound, 28′ 19”
Original soundtrack: Lucrecia Dalt

Decepción is a speculative fiction, a travel log and the story of an internal or existential displacement set before the mytho-poetic backdrop of Deception Island in the Antarctic. Based on the post-abyssal thinking of Boaventura de Souza, an inner monologue reflects on the idea of the South and an invisibilised humanity. The narration deals with the existence of extreme life forms which—until recently — were inconceivable to science, which has always measured survival according to anthropocentric notions. On Deception Island, which is the terrestrial analogue closest to planet Mars, the possibility of a biosphere in darkness and microbial life on other planets is being explored.

Departing from this journey and guided by a voice that dovetails with the imaginaries already conjured up by Poe, Verne, Lovecraft, and Lispector Decepción invites us to imagine ourselves as the fossils of a future universe.

Sonia Fernandez Pan

Be good, I love you
Speculative & emphatetic gathering. Non-humans are welcome
9 May 2018, 19:27

Is it possible to become plastic? To become chocolate? Your daily breakfast mug? How about becoming global warming? Can we become objects, things? Can we embody other bodies through empathy? Can we relate to each other within these “new bodies”? Can we think through systems of interactions rather than individuals? Furthermore, can we behave as systems of interactions rather than thinking about them? Maybe it is as simple as trying a collective exercise of empathy in relation to some of the non-human entities that join us in our life experience every day. But don’t worry, succeeding is not important. What matters is that, at least, we try.

Eva-Fiore Kovakovsky & Sina Ribak

Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club
#10 Session Grief:
30 May 2018, 19:30 – 21:30
#11 Session Hope:
6 June 2018, 19:30 – 21:30

In Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club participants read together texts related to natural sciences, art, anthropology, postcolonialism, and (post)anthropocene, chosen from a female perspective looking beyond disciplines.

Each session is a new constellation, a mix of people from diverse backgrounds forming the Reading Club. During the sessions, the participants spontaneously and intuitively explore texts, reading between the lines, stimulating exchange and gaining perspectives.

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, artist, and Sina Ribak, environmental & cultural manager, invite the attendants to be inspired and reminded of nature’s ability to hold us in the moment to force us to inhabit the present.

Credits

Curators: Lorena Juan, Lena Johanna Reisner, Anaïs Senli

Graphic design: Tea Palmelund
Texts: the curators and participating artists
Translations: Inga Imrich, Kristina Kramer, Zoë Claire Miller
Proofreading: Conor O’Rourke, Lena Johanna Reisner

Project assistance: Alexa Reinhart, Alice Royoux
Head of technical team: Hannah Ditioma Haraldsen
Technical team: Nicolás Gómez, Michael Hoepfel, Tibor Horvath, Anka Mirkin, Kerstin Podbiel, Serkan Servincili

Director of Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien: Stéphane Bauer

Courtesy the artists for all works if not mentioned otherwise

A project of Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe: Exhibition fund for municipal galleries, fund for artist remunerations. Supported by a project grant of the district office Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and the Spanish Embassy in Berlin.