Update on last month’s exhibition opening at Black Sesame Space, IFP. Members of the Extinction Club Reading Group read aloud passages from selected texts, everyone drank tea and ate homemade black sesame crackers and black sesame brittle.

A version of the reading group’s setup was installed in the gallery, with a folio of all our printed materials (stamped with the group’s new stone seal!), audio tapes and a player to listen to them on. Elsewhere in the room was a display of research relating to the book-in-progress, a cabinet of drawings and various materials associated with specific Chinese extinctions, another player with a tape containing the sound contributions so far – from Yan Jun, Jaakko Junnila and Ake – and a few smaller interventions in the space.

We also took the opportunity to read+record a (short) new cassette tape, ‘The Amazon of the East’, part of a chapter about the life of the Yangtze River from Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin by Samuel Turvey. It now joins the other nine tapes in the cassette library.

Above: Those that from a distance look like flies, 2019, wooden tiger’s head and binoculars

Photos by Augustina, Dandan & me

This project was assisted by a grant from Create NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government. The NSW Artists’ Grant is administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).

**Next meeting at IFP on Sunday afternoon, 30 December 2 – 5pm**

“The pika is a small, rather cute mammal that looks a bit like a hamster. … Since they depend on cool, high-mountain habitats to survive, pikas have been coping with the higher temperatures caused by climate change by moving up mountain slopes at a rate that has increased eleven-fold over the last ten years. Pikas eventually arrive at the top of their mountains; at this point, they have nowhere left to go to escape global warming.”

The rare and endangered ili pika, endemic to the Tianshan mountains of northwestern China and listed by he IUCN as vulnerable to extinction, has been described as ‘an unbelievably cute mammal with a teddy-bear face’. What do seductive start-up terms like ‘de-extinction’, ‘biogenesis’ and ‘ecomodernism’ have to do with our plucky little climbing pika? How do arguments for a techno-engineered biodiversity prop up the old myth of endless growth continuing to drive our planet to the brink of disaster? In his book Extinction: A Radical History (2016), Ashley Dawson calls for an anticapitalist movement against extinction, one that rejects ‘capitalist biopiracy and imperialist enclosure of the global commons’. We’ll read a chapter from the book and share some cake.

**Next meeting at IFP on Thursday afternoon, 20 December 2–5pm**

‘Couldn’t ticks be just a little extinct?’ Tom Horton 

We meet again this Thursday at IFP to read ‘Blood Intimacies and Biodicy: Keeping Faith with Ticks’ by James Hatley, which comes from the journal Australian Humanities Review no. 50 (2011): ‘Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions’. Though a figure of revulsion to many, the tick is ‘one of our many co-evolved Earth others’, as much part of the messy tangle of life as we ourselves are. In this essay, Hatley asks: how we may love that which causes us to suffer?

All welcome, no preparation or expertise needed.

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“As the ecological crisis grew, the schema of zoo as Eden was soon replaced by that of the Ark. If the former offered its animal charges leisure and security over inhospitable wilderness, the latter offered refuge from apocalyptic destruction. Their human visitors were now also their rescuers; to communion was added redemption.” – [Matthew Chrulew 2011]

Following a trip south to Suzhou Zoo to visit two of only three remaining Yangtze Giant Softshell Turtles in the world and the extinct-in-the-wild South China Tiger, this week the group will read Matthew Chrulew’s essay ‘Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation’ (Australian Humanities Review, 2011), which delves into the contemporary biopolitics of zoological care. While many species are left to slip away unnoticed, what of those that we insist on keeping alive at all costs? How to love in a time of extinction?

New readers welcome, as always. RSVP if you can (and we’ll send you the text beforehand), or just turn up. This time we’ll also make soup!

**Next meeting at IFP on Thursday afternoon, 25 October, 4pm**

Let’s meet again to continue reading. Plenty of options regarding texts, we’ll decide together on the day. Maybe chapter five of Thom van Dooren’s Flightways, ‘Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World’ (2014).

**Next meeting at IFP on Wednesday evening, 10 October 5:30pm**

Post-holiday! This week we’ll continue to read aloud together and discuss, recording parts of the meeting for an extinction audio book cassette library.

On offer this time is the very recent collection After Extinction (2018), edited by Richard Grusin. I would suggest the chapter ‘Photography after Extinction’, by Joanna Zylinska, which attempts to think photography under the horizon of extinction, as a ‘light-induced process of fossilization’ working across time and matter.

As always, newcomers are welcome, no preparation or expertise needed.

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[image from Ernst P. Walker (1964) Walker’s Mammals of the World, John Hopkins University Press]

**Next meeting at IFP on Friday afternoon, 21 September, 1pm**

‘life is a product of putrefaction, and it depends on both death and the dungheap’[i]

At the last meeting we took some sound recordings to begin an extinction audio book cassette library, which could eventually share some of our activities beyond the group. This week we’re going to read for the library a chapter from Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways (2014), ‘Circling Vultures: Life and Death at the Dull Edge of Extinction’, concerned with Indian vultures and ‘the dynamics and practicalities of eating and being eaten in multispecies communities’. We’ll also look at the Introduction to Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017), which gives a good overview of why lively stories on this topic matter right now.

Afterwards we’ll have a discussion about the local relevance of this kind of work and thinking. No prior preparation needed, newcomers always welcome.

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[image L: Lionel Lindsay, Indian Vulture, 1933. wood engraving. National Library of Australia / image R: cover, Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, Matthew Chrulew (eds.) Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017), New York: CUP]

[i] Georges Bataille, ‘Death.’ In The Bataille Reader, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds.) (1997) Oxford: Blackwell. p. 224. Cited in Thom van Dooren Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014) New York: CUP p. 45