Productions of Nature: Selected Writing from & Documentation of Reassembling the Natural, an Exhibition-led Inquiry into the Legacy of Natural History Collections in the Anthropocene

• SeedBooks
• Published: forthcoming
• ISBN: 978-1-78542-149-5
• PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-148-8

Forthcoming

Productions of Nature” brings together, for the first time in a single volume, more than a decade of work from Reassembling the Natural (RN), the exhibition-led research initiative founded in 2013 by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin. At once a record of curatorial interventions and a reflection on their conditions, the book assembles a wide constellation of texts, images, and documentary material from RN’s exhibitions, fieldwork, partnerships, and publishing projects across Southeast Asia, Europe, China, and North America.

Reassembling the Natural sought to interrogate the colonial, material, and epistemic infrastructures of natural history: the museums themselves, their zoological, botanical, and geological collections, their taxonomic and racializing orders, and their didactic displays. If natural history museums once naturalized extractive worldviews—transforming multispecies worlds into classificatory grids, specimens into evidence, and Indigenous territories into natural resources—RN asked instead how these institutions can be both deconstructed and reconfigured to foster practices of ecological reparation, multispecies care, and more-than-human affiliation.

Rather than presenting findings in any conventional sense, Productions of Nature traces the methods and collaborations that have emerged across the many years of RN’s inquiry. These include extended fieldwork in Southeast Asia, archival study of figures such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Lynn Margulis, and intercultural exchanges with artists, scientists, and theorists whose work challenge dominant orders of knowledge. The book gathers previously dispersed and discontinuous materials—including essays, interviews, curatorial statements, artworks, and installation and exhibition documentation—into a shared space where to reveal the processes animating this multiplicitous inquiry. In this sense, the publication is less retrospective than curatorial montage: it stages RN’s experiments in the form of an evolving series of assemblages. Just as the exhibitions themselves operated within and against existing collections—overlaying new voices, soundscapes, and moving images onto entrenched displays—so too the book juxtaposes heterogeneous elements to evoke the promiscuous, multi-faceted range of the inquiry. Readers are invited to move between speculative conversations and photographic documentation, critical essays and artists’ interventions, always encountering processes of transformation that encourage plurality, difference, and reparation.

Productions of Nature also reflects on the stakes of curatorial work today, among the raging ruins of the Anthropocene. At a time when the “ecological turn” has become a thematic commonplace across biennials and cultural institutions, RN insists instead on deeper questions of method and imagination that belie any attempt to meaningfully engage with the planetary crisis. How can curatorial practice avoid consoling gestures of “ecological empathy,” and instead confront institutional complicity in extractive and consumptive logics? How might colonial collections— repositories of both biodiversity and violence—be reactivated as sites of ecological memory and multispecies encounter? And, how can artists, scientists, and culture workers attend to these questions collaboratively, across cultures and disciplines, to cultivate what Reassembling the Natural describes as the “habitat interface”—threshold spaces where ecological inscriptions and cultural mediations converge, metabolizing past destruction into the possibility of new, amendatory relations?

By bringing together more than decade of work, Productions of Nature makes visible a methodology grounded in practice: exhibition-making as inquiry, publishing as ideogenic relay, and archival research and fieldwork as forms of ecological attentiveness. This book is not a summary of a past experiment, but a demonstration of how “nature” is always and only produced both socially and culturally; because of this fact, the book shows how exhibitions can serve as provisional, collective architectures for rehearsing both the abeyant afterlives and fragile futures of our living world.