Extinction Club Reading Group | 读书会 灭绝学

SATURDAY 12 January 2019 15:00 // readings at 16:00
Black Sesame Space, Heizhima Hutong 13, Dongcheng, Beijing

‘Each time an existence disappears, it is a piece of the universe of sensations that fades away’

[Vinciane Despret, ‘Afterword: It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared’, in Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose and Mathew Chrulew (eds.), 2017, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations] 

Biologists suggest we are now entering the sixth mass extinction event since complex life evolved on earth. Extinction however, is no singular phenomenon, but rather is ‘experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performed and narrated in a variety of ways to which we must attend’ (van Dooren, Rose and Chrulew). With increasing heat, pollution and toxicity putting pressure unevenly on all forms of life, how might we now learn ‘to live and die well with each other in a thick present’, as Donna Haraway puts it? What does it mean to cohabit with other species in such a thick, entangled present, where multiple times overlap and intersect, and those of many entities and assemblages as we know them are approaching an end? What are the politics, poetics and affects of more-than-human finitude? And how to collectively acknowledge or commemorate the loss to our own ‘universe of sensations’ when one piece of it disappears?

During six months in residence at IFP, Australian artist Tessa Zettel has hosted an extinction club study group as a way to think together with local participants on these and other questions. Over a series of irregular meetings and field trips, the group recorded a mini-cassette library of their extinction-related readings – covering amongst other things fossil nihilism, passenger pigeons, database aesthetics, de-extinction and cosmoecologies – that is now ready to be shared.

The Extinction Club Reading Group forms part of research for a longer-term project by the artist to make a handmade, riso-printed book + cassette about extinctions in China, telling speculative stories of a variety of nonhumans (animals, birds, gastropods) but also technologies, languages and ways of living) facing permanent erasure. Many curious tales of past and impending loss weave through this rapidly transforming landscape, like the 80-million year old pangolin (the most illegally-trafficked and only fully-scaled mammal); the functionally extinct baiji or Yangtze river dolphin, and the Père David’s deer, once extinct in China but today flourishing again in Beijing’s Nanhaizi Park. Borrowing its title and categories from the fictional Chinese encyclopedia in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’, the book is a kind of delirious compendium describing how different beings, ecologies and histories are entangled together in webs that are both material and ethical, and borne across time and space by the dynamics of colonisation, extraction and exchange. Its cassette tape component will include sound pieces by contributing artists responding to figures of extinction here in China, from the dǎkǒu or cut-out CDs (Yan Jun, China) and a certain thing (Ake, China) to the prehistoric Chinese paddlefish (Jaakko Junnila, Finland).

IFP and Tessa Zettel invite you to see and hear this collective work-in-progress at IFP’s Black Sesame Space. With tea, texts, sounds and black sesame snacks.

**Next (& final!) meeting at IFP on Sunday afternoon, 6 January 1 – 4pm**

Ursula K. Heise X Ursula K. Le Guin

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species classifies Homo sapiens under Least Concern, as ‘the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline. … Humans are present in numerous protected areas throughout their range,” including not only all continents on Earth but also the International Space Station (https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/136584/4313662 ).

‘It’s the story that makes the difference … Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it’, Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Carrier-bag Theory of Fiction’ (1989)

In Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), Ursula K. Heise writes that global biodiversity databases such as the IUCN Red List can be understood as a new variant of the modern epic or world text, a cultural form of storytelling emerging from ‘an encyclopedic, centripetal impulse that reaches back to the Enlightenment and seeks to inventory the entire known world’. Considering database aesthetics, science fiction and other narrative modes, she asks ‘how might we acknowledge the realities of large-scale species extinction and yet move beyond mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia to a more affirmative vision of our biological future?’

In this final meeting we’ll consider encyclopedias, elegies and epics, and of course eat cake.

Saturday 22 Dec** [Note new date!!] | Leaving from IFP at 12 pm, back sometime in the afternoon (possible also to join us in the park)

The Fengshen Bang, a classical text from the Ming Dynasty, tells the story of a horse, a donkey, an ox and a deer meditating together in a cave in the forest while the tyrant King Zhou of Shang wreaks havoc on the land. The unlikely troupe decides to enter society as humans, whereupon they transform themselves into one super-animal combining the abilities and body parts of each. Galloping to the Kunlun Mountains to obtain the Primeval Lord of Heaven’s blessing, this hybrid creature – the milu, or Père David’s Deer – then joins nobleman Jiang Ziya to overthrow the king and found the Zhou Dynasty.

By other accounts, wild milu roam the swampy grasslands of South-eastern China for two million years before they are hunted more or less to oblivion, a thousand years ago. Just one captive herd remain then behind the walls of Beijing’s Nanyuan Imperial Hunting Garden, until floods and starving humans take care of them too, leaving the species teetering at the edge of extinction. After a few more curious twists of fate, these days milu can be found thriving in the very same garden, now known as Milu Park (also home to the ‘World Extinct Wildlife Cemetery’). Could the milu be a symbol for those pockets of refugia in which unlike species can flourish in dark times?

Join the Extinction Club Reading Group on a day trip to visit the milu and the monument to extinct wildlife. We’ll read for them some new poetry by Australian poet Aden Rolfe, and drink hot tea.

Wear warm clothes & bring binoculars if you can! / Please RSVP via wechat or by emailing.