Nostalgia for Humanity exhibition presenting the work of artists who deal with topics related to human domination of the Earth's ecosystems

The progressive warming of the climate has increased the number of extreme weather phenomena that we are unable to predict. ‘Nostalgia for Humanity’ is an exhibition presenting the work of artists who deal with topics related to human domination of the Earth’s ecosystems. Through the use of various techniques and theories, the artists portray a desperate need for human change. Their work helps us to find opportunities to explore the outer limits of what we are capable of in order to move forward.

Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta invite the viewer to step into other ways to imagine ourselves and our relationships within an ecosystem. The piece exhibited in Krakow entitled ‘Moss Exoskeleton’ imagines a time when human artefacts and technology create relationships to prosper other life. Drawing ideas from nature offers fresh perspectives on how different types of creatures can work together to develop symbiotic partnerships. ‘We can’t help but think that there’s much to learn from similar examples of how we create seeds of change together, and by opening our eyes to these possibilities, it helps us consider our place in the world differently,’ artists say.  

Others get inspiration from fungus as well. The video essay ‘Infrastructures for Each Other’ exhibited as a part of the ‘MycoMythologies’ project, is an ongoing series of artworks by Saša Spačal. It is an attempt at a polyphonic montage that forms a digital image with an combination of multiple human and non-human forces. This artistic decision was inspired by fungal ability to provide infrastructure not only for the organisms that they connect to but also for bacteria that travel along extensive fungal networks. Saša states that defining an isolated organism is actually a point of view and a myth perpetuated by capitalistic society, which does not take into account the ability of organisms to form networks with other networks and infrastructures that sustain multiplicities. 

Artists show us a perspective shift into potentialities generated by removing humans as singular creators – instead recognising there are always others facilitating the possibilities for life to unfold. Viewers are invited to consider what can be gained through such perspective shifts and take action by practicing alternative ways of seeing and taking better care of each other and the living world. 

Each piece displayed has a need for change at its core and is the most powerful when it becomes a part of who we are. The responsibility is with all of us; on an individual, governmental and global level. Even seemingly insignificant behavioural changes or technological innovations can contribute to evolutionary development. We can’t help but ask ourselves: how can we redefine what it means to be human?

This is what artists and curators have to say:

Monika Weychert, co-curator 

YD: The exhibition touches on the current age, in which a level of human activity affects the environment and plays a significant role in the planet’s ecosystem. In your opinion, what is the best-case scenario when it comes to actions a viewer should take after visiting the show? What thoughts should it plant in their mind?

MW: That is an interesting question because it deals with our expectations from art exhibitions and art itself. 

No longer do I harbour illusions regarding any actions that a viewer should or will take after seeing the show. What I find the most appealing in the displayed pieces is that creative intuition often makes incredibly accurate diagnoses, at times preceding those made by scientists and researchers who have always connected with social, critical and participatory art. However, I have been working in this field for twenty years now, and I am no longer convinced that art has the direct influence on people it once did. Still, if someone, at least one person, re-evaluates a given subject – looks at it from a different angle or perspective – then I would consider it an enormous success. In the social sphere of life, art was dissolved a long time ago. It is no longer an exceptional tool for social change, just one of many. To sum it up, the exhibition showcases various emotional reactions to a crisis – a vast array of attitudes and scenarios. Among others, we could view landscapes marred with environmental degradation and post-industrial spleen (Magdalena Lazar and Marcin Pazera, Krzysztof Marchlak, Andrzej Najder). Anticipating a post-crisis future of humankind, we could imagine a close bond with nature through new technologies, creating the so-called infrastructures of life (Dunne & Raby, Kaitlin Bryson & Saša Spačal), or the final extinction of people who leave their legacy at the mercy of artificial intelligence (Jacek Złoczowski). The exhibition also features works portraying activism (Cecylia Malik) or even optimistic visions: a possibility of escape and survival (Łukasz Murzyn). The viewer could choose any variant and look at all these various perspectives from a bird’s-eye view. In the second case, an access point seemed much more pessimistic.

YD: The exhibition speaks of utopia and nostalgia that emerged in the period of innovation and rapid technological advancement of the 20th century, as well as the global environmental problem consolidating the organic with the mechanical/digital. This idea leaves humanity no choice. Either people revert to their previous way of life devoid of technology, or they ‘sell their souls to the devil,’ leading to extinction and leaving their legacy to the power of artificial intelligence. What can we do as humankind? What area could combine science and digital technologies to solve the problem? Where does the border lie, and how can we solve this problem verging on digital technology and natural phenomena?

MW: There is this famous quote by Czesław Miłosz, which recently has been invoked: ‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled.’ The legend has it that he wrote it himself on a bathroom wall at the university. I believe it is graffiti from the restaurant at Berkley university described in ‘Visions from San Francisco Bay.’ I am so annoyed, and I am not the only one, by the fact that politicians, corporations and other agents have squandered the future of the planet and the fate of humankind – however pompous that sounds – for the sake of their current agendas. Our point of departure was rather a constatation that the moment we could do something important had already passed. Therefore, we focused on feelings. And feelings are complicated.

Let’s take, for instance, climate change denial. It stands for both a denial of an ongoing catastrophe and pessimism about mitigating the consequences since ‘there is nothing we can do anyway,’ an overtly defeatist belief at the end of the world. That is why I greatly appreciate the notion of solastalgia, coined by the Australian philosopher Glen Albrecht. This neologism combines the Latin sōlācium (comfort, consolation) and the Greek root -algia (pain, sickness). It is often used to describe environmental fear or a pre-traumatic stress disorder related to the climate crisis. We are incapable of imagining a world utterly devoid of humans or one where humanity doesn’t survive. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that AI or other technologies could outlive us as a species. But, on the other hand, we seek brand-new utopias and a subversive effect of nostalgia for the sake of comfort. We are perplexed, unreconciled, restlessly oscillating between hope and doubt.

YD: Visual solutions applied by curators of the exhibition bring the viewer’s attention to human relations with the natural environment and technology. An assemblage of plastic elements and sheets on the ceiling makes it seem as if the viewer is under polluted water of oceans and seas. I suppose it begs the question about the best way to approach these subjects in the context of art and exhibitions. It is easy to fall into a trap while discussing inevitable changes in ecosystem’s spurred by human activity. In your opinion, what sort of tools should be used to avoid falling prey to these ideas, which one criticises?

MW: Unfortunately, everything is part of this trap today. Although we tried to minimize some elements of the exhibition, so that they could be used again elsewhere, we still used a lot of energy plugging in the works and lighting up the space – though we reduced the number of lamps to save energy. Although we tried to limit transportation of the pieces, we still left a carbon footprint travelling from Warsaw to Kraków. You can’t escape that. Such is the nature of the invasive species of homo sapiens. Perhaps it is just not worth it to ignore this and and pretend otherwise. We have to be mindful and attuned to our surroundings. We also have to live and make loud statements, e.g. through a narrative of an exhibition. We need to look for some sort of balance, I guess. There is no good answer to this question. Some people are aware of the fact that the planet will be burning, that there will be a shortage of food and water, as well as more pandemics, huge migrations and economic crises. Some artists approached this predicament with a hint of irony: a cyborg toy becomes a killer (Bartosz Zaskórski), Yorick’s skull is already overgrown with plants (Burton & Nitta), human-fish hybrids created in the reverse evolution process are swimming in the oceans (Daniel Lee), only tree spirits are singing in the forests (Natalia Kopytko). Perhaps all we can do now is laugh through the tears. This exhibition is not dealing with the upcoming hell, it is about looking at our feelings, predictions, intuition, bifurcation and emotional turmoil.

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MycoMythologies: Infrastructures for Each Other

Saša Spačal

Yeva Dec: Referring to your challenge for myths of individualism using practice and knowledge about fungi, would you share your opinion on what we can learn from them? How can mushrooms help and inform humans? 

Saša Spačal: The work ‘MycoMythologies: Infrastructures for Each Other’ summons human, mycelial and computer-vision-agencies to join together in a performance of entanglement, providing understanding that the practices of human and other-than-human infrastructures are made with and informed by one another. Working with the AI networks of styleGAN, trained on datasets of human faces, mycelium, roots, rivers, pipelines, roadways and extraction facilities, infrastructures are generated to enfold and erode into each other. Becoming infrastructures of and for each other.

The video essay is an attempt at polyphonic montage that allows the digital image to be formed with agency of multiple human and non-human forces while revealing its constitutive parts – the pixels. The infrastructure that enables humans to generate and see digital images is exposed with pixel sorting flow, hinting at the fact that digital images are one of the tools that enable human beings to see beyond our species, thus its production should be questioned constantly.

As stated above, the artists in the collaborative process are removed as the only force of creation while the multiplicities of human and other-than-human (biological and technological) actors are acknowledged as co-creators. This artistic decision was informed by fungal ability to provide infrastructure not only for the organisms that they connect to such as trees, bushes and plants, but also for bacteria that travel along extensive fungal networks growing in the soils beneath our feet. 

Due to fungal symbiotic and connective talents, assigning individuality to fungal species is actually extremely hard. Once scientists established that one fungal hyphae could host numerous nuclei with different genetic material, the use of genetic identification as a basis to define an individual, has become questionable and the individual, supposedly in constant competition, has found itself entangled into symbiotic networks. Filamentous fungi inform us that, defining an individual organism is actually a decision perpetuated by the practices of a capitalistic society. Such practices tend to assert the constant struggle for individual survival, whilst they negate the networks, the infrastructures that support and sustain multiplicities.  

Fungal being-ness provides a model of what’s possible through symbiotic collaboration: how resources could be shared, how networks could thrive, how ideas could merge and exponentialize into multiplicities. As such collaboration is mostly not easy, as it requires extra work, flexibility, mutability, communication, negotiation, softness and openness. However, these are qualities that might help us find a path to multi-species survival in the wake of deadly social polarization and climate change.

YD: I am also very curious to know whose ideas among philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, etc, are close to you. Who did you read and study, and who or what inspired you to implement this and your other projects?

SS: ‘MycoMythologies’ emerged out of an aspiration to create new mythologies and working myths that might help imagine a human evolutionary trajectory different from that we are currently following. The continuous inspiration for the whole series is numerous fungal co-creators (Hericium Erinaceus, Pleurotus ostreatus, Cladosporium sphaerospermum etc.), their capabilities and science fiction writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler since each artwork employs one form of storytelling.  

The work ‘MycoMythologies: Infrastructures for Each Other’ created with Kaitlin Bryson, shares this inspiration while it thinks in the networks of such thinkers as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Donna Haraway, Lynn Margulis, Toby Kiers, Merlin Sheldrake, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Benjamin H. Bratton, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Baruch Spinoza, Timothy Morton, Rosi Braidotti, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Neimanis, Karen Barad, David Abrams, Robert McFarlane, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jake Skeets … 

YD: Last but not least, what do you expect from the viewer, and what action should he take after seeing your work, if any? What do you offer the viewer?

SS: What is offered is a perspective shift into potentialities generated by removing humans as singular creators – instead recognising that there are always others (biological and technical) facilitating the possibilities for life to unfold. When we are able to acknowledge the agential realities of multiple species, we might understand that we are all implicated in each other’s lives, and we all make this world and make meaning together. Our world is constructed through the operations of microscopic beings who make fertile soil, humans who build roadways to enable transportation, to technology that empowers our human species to see beyond our own limitations. Viewers are invited to consider what can be gained through such perspective shifts and take action by practising alternative ways of noticing and taking better care of each other and the living world. 

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Moss Exoskeleton 

Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta

Yeva Dec: You are talking about nostalgia as a technique that provokes change. Referring to this, I would like to ask a few questions. What do you expect from the viewer? What action should they take after seeing the work, if any? What do you offer the viewer?

Michael Burton & Michiko Nitta: We invite the viewer to step into other ways to imagine ourselves and our relationships within an ecosystem. The pieces within Biota Beings are investigations of curiosity. The works reframe assumptions and spotlight motives within our human nature whilst presenting opportunities and possibilities.

The series of works consider humans on a biological scale to reveal the interconnections in ecosystem’s that we exist within. Through these relationships, we are curious to explore the human blind spots that are more apparent at this scale. For instance, the limits of how we perceive the world around us, navigate complexity, think in deep timeframes, and consider the consequences of our actions and inventions.

A host of researchers inspire the work, including Donna Harraway, Timothy Morton, Susanne Simard, Merlin Sheldrake, Thor Hanson, and Roman Krznaric. Other views of the world also shape the responses, including through story, folklore, magic, and animistic belief systems.

The piece exhibited in Krakow entitled ‘Moss Exoskeleton’ imagines a time when human artefacts and technology create relationships to prosper and facilitate other life. This helmet from the exoskeleton nurtures moss as an environmental engineer once the human has discarded it. The moss kick-starts a chain of relationships, and the helmet becomes a site for habitats. As an artefact, its afterlife allows other species to flourish.

We leave elements of the work open for viewers to bring their speculations and narratives on the events surrounding the piece. For instance, a skeleton made as a result of the climate crisis is now found in abandonment; what events led to this moment? Where is the human now? Do humans still exist, and if so, in what form?

The piece also has the potential to act as a catalyst to imagine future timelines. For instance, what other organisms will inhabit this artefact? How will it interact with the surrounding environment? What subsequent artefacts replace this as a tool for future humans?

As a growing body of work, Biota Beings offers a doorway to step into an alternative worldview where we prioritise nurturing life beyond the human world, changing how we act and define ourselves.

There is a spirit of change at the core of this work. How the change manifests is open for everyone to decide. After all, effective change is most powerful when it becomes part of our identity, so how might we redefine what it is to be human? Who do we want to be? How should we act?

As we face a climate emergency, there is a stark call to action. We find opportunities to imagine the extremes of how far we can change to make long-sighted and transformational steps forward. By exploring the extremes of what these transformations can be, we open up imagination and possibilities for us to reflect on what to avoid or pursue.

YD: Do you think that humanity could one day reach the point of not destroying the planet with our actions and conditions, but evolving them?

MB & MN: We believe there is always hope for change. However, we want to resist complacency, where we bury our heads in the sand and wait for a ‘quick fix’  intervention where everything can carry on as normal. There have been at least five mass extinction events in Earth’s history. With this realisation, we confront the possibility of failure and are left with a window of time to take action. But, eventually we will reach a time when options will be taken away from us. There are many challenges facing us and underpinning all of these is a need to change. How do we make long-sighted changes? The responsibility is with all of us on an individual, governmental and global level.

We find intrigue in how the seemingly small shifts in behaviour or a technological invention can gather into evolutionary development.

YD: What would we, as a collective, ideally do to make it happen?

MB & MN: We feel we require a wide inclusion of people contributing to action and ideas. We should take inspiration from the natural world, which gives us new examples of organisms sharing resources across species boundaries and forming cooperative, symbiotic relationships. These partnerships, such as fungi that ferry nutrients between trees, as shown by biologist Suzanne Simard, help make the trees resilient to change. So instead of a ‘survival of the fittest’ model, we find opportunities to meet change through a cooperative and connected world. We can’t help but think that there’s much to learn from similar examples of how we create seeds of change together, and by opening our eyes to these possibilities, it helps us consider our place in the world differently.

YD: What are we as humans? What could a human be?

MB & MN: We find fascination in theories that give us other views into what and who we are as humans. These include the view that alongside human cells, we are an ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that live on and inside us. These are vital to bodily functions such as digestion and immunity.

When we consider ourselves as an ecosystem of other things, beside human cells, it turns us into a being full of ‘other’ organisms that contributes to the thing we call human.

In previous works such as ‘Algaculture,’ we imagine how we could build upon the relationships within the human body ecosystem, to add new micro-organisms and technology to extend the abilities of the human race.

Interviewed by Yeva Dec

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Nostalgia for Humanity

exhibition

27 October – 18 November 2022

Project website

Visit the exhibition online