Reassembling the Natural

"Compensatory Postures: Natural History, Necroaesthetics, and Humiliation"

— essay co-written for Tristan Garcia & Vincent Normand (eds.), "Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions," Sternberg Press, 2019, 161–72.

We’re very pleased to be co-contributors to Tristan Garcia & Vincent Normand’s forthcoming edited publication “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions” with contributions by Etienne Chambaud, Elitze Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Raphael Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Jeremy Lecomte, Stéphane Lojkine, Sami Khatib, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, Joao Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Kim West, and Charles Wolfe. Berlin: Sternberg Press, published in August 2019.

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2019 02 28

"Biomonotony" by Etienne Turpin

— essay in the catalog for the "Broken Nature" XXII Triennale di Milano

photo by Armin Linke

The XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, highlights the concept of restorative design and studies the state of the threads that connect humans to their natural environments—some frayed, others altogether severed.

Etienne’s essay contribution to the exhibition catalog is accompanied by a selection of Martina Pozzan’s photographic research project Musa x paradisiaca L. on “micropropagation” of plants in the lab; a commercial plant multiplication technique that offers genetically identical shoots for plantations and orchards.

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2019 01 09–13

Prototype for a Museum of Man

— Seminar project at the (Un)-Learning Place: The New Alphabet School, HKW, Berlin

During the Opening Days of the Haus der Kulturen’s new long-term project “The New Alphabet” in January 2019, HKW offers a five-day curriculum for gathering, discussion and workshops—entitled the “(Un-)Learning Place” curated by Boris Buden and Olga von Schubert. Here, eight Berlin-based collectives from the scenes of art, culture, and activism work with more than 80  international participants to develop transdisciplinary, decolonial, and anti-hegemonic strategies in relation to data-based knowledge, translation, archives, and embodied infrastructures. The seminar that we will offer in this context is entitled “The New Education: Denaturalizing the Cultural Pedagogy of Museum Technologies” and critically explores the traditional belief in human exceptionalism as one of the foundational principles of museum traditions. The outcome of this collaborative research process will be a global yet partial taxonomy of the technologies of human exceptionalism in museological culture past and present. The taxonomy will be presented under the title “An Incomplete Museum of Anthroposupremacism” and displayed as a web-based, annotated, searchable digital museum.

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