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Museum of Nonhumanity 

Museum of Nonhumanity 

Posted by: TerikeH

Terike Haapoja 
Museum of Nonhumanity 
Published in: Radical History Review 


During the Finnish civil war in 1918 the renowned author Ilmari Kianto called for the extermination of the “wolf bitches” that he saw as a threat to the independence and future of the country. Fought between the working class—who, encouraged by the Russian Revolution, rose up against the owning class—and the nationalist bourgeoisie, the civil war was a class struggle in the wake of the country’s independence. The victory of the new, conservative government was followed by violent suppression of the revolutionaries. The so-called Red Guard fighters were killed en masse, while an estimated 2,500 women and girls as young as fourteen, who had taken up arms alongside their men, perished or were executed in prison camps.i 

It is to these women that Kianto refers when he writes: 

Wouldn’t it be a proper strategy to take a certain percentage of the enemy’s other sex too—thus giving a moral lesson to the female accomplices of these miserable creatures? In wolf hunting it is the she-wolf rather than the male that makes a better target. For the hunter knows that the bitch will produce new whelps to bring eternal trouble. It has been proven that the Red Guards in the Finnish civil war are beasts, and many of their women wolf bitches; I venture to say even she-tigers. Isn’t it completely insane not to shoot down the beasts that harass us?ii

Kianto’s call for culling of the peasant rebels coincided with a warlike culling of wolf populations. Canis lupus, a previously common animal in the region, was hunted to extinction in the country by 1920, and aggressive wolf hunts aimed at keeping its population at zero continued until the 1970s. In spite of the absence of the animal itself, the wolf has remained a powerful creature in Finnish political mythology, where it functions as a boundary figure between the center and the periphery, the domesticated and the wild, the desired and the unwanted, the dominant and the dominated. While present-day environmentalists seek to protect the population from extinction, for many, wolves symbolize a threat to a traditional hierarchy that runs from God to men, to women, and eventually to nature. For them, maintaining this hierarchy requires constant suppression, justified by vilifying the othered as murderous if liberated. Nearly one hundred years after Kianto, in 2015 an online debater commented on the protection of wolf populations: “I can assure you that HUNTING WILL NEVER STOP. . . . We do know how you protectors have aimed at preventing the hunting, haha in your dreams. I hope we’ll soon get rid of those wolf mongrels.” 

…..

Long before being officially acknowledged as a geological era, the term Anthropocene and its periodization has been intensively critiqued. Not only does the proposed geological marker obscure the colonial violence and extraction that underlies it, but it also blames a species for destruction brought on the whole planet by a small minority of its members, thereby repeating the structure of blaming the victim for the violence inflicted on them. While the term has been countered by multiple other, more suitable -cenes (“capitalocene,” “white supremacy scene,” “plantationocene”iii), less attention has been given to examining the word anthropos and the mechanisms by which the culprits of this -cene have been able to act on behalf of and as representatives of the whole of humanity. In fact, one of the most foundational drivers of this planetary-scale violence is the way in which humanity itself has been mobilized as an exclusive category in the Western imaginary. 

Humans are, of course, animals. There’s nothing that all other species share that differentiates them from us, nor is there any capacity that humans possess that isn’t possessed also by some other species. As many animal rights theorists have pointed out in the past, the moral and legal permission to exploit and kill other animals with impunity cannot be founded on any essential biological or cultural difference between us and them. Yet the history of Western thought can be seen as an ongoing attempt to ground this division on some quality that humans have, that non- human animals lack. Possessing a soul, rationality, language, tool-making skills or social intelligence are just some of the qualities proposed to carry that function. Giorgio Agamben has coined the term anthropological machine to describe this ongoing operation at the heart of Western thought that tries to ceaselessly, and for- ever unsuccessfully, separate humanity from its underlying animal body.iv 

While many instances in the historical development of rights have been bound to political belonging, such as citizenship, the notion of universal human rights anchored these rights to species belonging. Will Kymlicka notes how some of the early theorists of universal human rights made this claim explicitly: humans should have rights exactly and only because humans are not animals.v Here, rights are based on speciesism, which is ultimately just decisionism: some don’t have rights just because the ones in power will so. As Kymlicka points out, this is an absurd reversal of the purpose of the human rights project, which should protect exactly against such decisionism.vi Because the moral divide is ultimately arbitrary, it needs to be constantly reinforced through practices of different treatment. Stem cell research offers a revealing example: while research on human embryos needs to be terminated by the fourteenth day from fertilization, which is considered the point in which individuation begins, research on nonhuman embryos has no such limit, even if as a biological matter they are identical. vii Merely the potential to become human protects some cells from being experimented on, while the lack of this potential dooms others to experiments throughout their development and likely through the lives of the fully grown organisms. 

Because humanity emerges in this arrangement as a site of political belonging and privilege, it remains a site of contest. In the history of the Western imaginary, who counts as human has been defined not only in relationship to nonhuman animals but also to human others. Projecting onto cultural others a lack of presum- ably “human” qualities such as language, soul, or rationality has been used to construct the figure of a subhuman that becomes constitutive of the figure of the human proper. Maneesha Deckha writes that postcolonial scholarship has shown that “the rational and autonomous liberal actor always requires an Other through which to establish himself.”viii Thus the history of Western science is built on experimentation on the bodies of enslaved, female, poor, or disabled people, who have not been considered human enough to deserve protection. In the modern era the invention of race has become a primary means of managing the boundary of humanity. Ilmari Kianto’s call for the extermination of Red Guard women as population control was based on the race science of his time, eugenics, that foregrounded the white, able- bodied European man as normatively human.  


….


Claire Colebrook chronicles how the figure of the anthropos has always been defined by existential threats in the Western imagination: “he is set apart from all life in the world by his existential fragility.”ixAccording to Colebrook, “To be properly human is to be at risk, to be threatened with falling back into being mere life, a part of the world, becoming nothing but a body without a sense of the globe, man or Anthropos.”x In this narrative, the human is, ontologically, a figure defined by its perpetual victory in a perpetual war against hostile forces that threaten to annihilate it. Our current climate chaos–focused horizon has again been captured by this possibility of the nonbeing of humanity, reinforcing this narrative. Colebrook asks how “one negotiate[s] the genuine brutality of the present without buying into a fantasy of apocalypse that fetishizes humanity by way of a violent destruction of all that renders humanity fragile” and through that justifies disaster capitalism and global states of emergency.xi 

Following Colebrook, the “Anthropos” of the Western imaginary needs the other/othered not only as a binary opposite, but also, and maybe more importantly, as a perpetual threat to its existence. While the idea of universal human rights seeks to ensure all people are protected, it’s an obvious fact that all laws, including laws that regulate killing, are always situation specific. Important exceptions to the prohibition of killing include self-defense, war, and states of exception.xiiAnd so, when humanity is defined through an existential threat, these exceptions are always ready to be activated by perceived threats by the other/othered to the human subject. To be threatened is thus not only an experiential condition of “the human,” but a structural condition for the possibility of its existence. Without this threat, the figure collapses. Thus perpetual production of situations where the other/othered is placed in the role of a perpetrator is necessary in order to prove this danger, and through that, to reinforce the identity of “the human.” A mob of white protesters storming the US Capitol is not perceived as an existential threat by a white supremacist legal order, in an atrocious contrast to peaceful Black protestors who are subjected to violent repression. Instead, the mere existence of the peaceful Black protestors legitimates the violence of the white mob. The phrase “the purpose of the system is what it does” is useful here: if the system produces killing of racialized minorities with impunity, that is the purpose of the system.xiii 

As Deckha notes, extending rights isn’t enough if the underlying humanism is left intact.xiv In other words, as long as the subject of rights is defined through a negation of an other, those included need to assimilate to this logic and find a new other to constitute their identity as rights holders. Thus the need to reinforce racial and speciesist boundaries is sometimes strongest among those whose belonging is most precarious. Humanity in the Western imaginary appears as an ungrounded category, that is less bound to phenotype than to the logic of decisionism of the powerful and negation of the other/othered, who or whatever they are. As Syl Ko observes, while racialized people are othered through animalization, racial imagination in turn informs how nonhuman animals are perceived.xv In a classical act of gaslighting, power projects on its subjects its own brutality, irrationality, and sexual instinct. In the white supremacist, patriarchal imagination, the categories of subhuman, less human, and nonhuman merge into different variations of nonwhite, non-rational, non-Man. 

…..


More recent theories of human rights have diverted from speciesism and instead sought to ground rights on qualities such as vulnerability or precariousness, centering care ethics or capability-based theories.xvi These approaches open a door to continuity with other beings who share these qualities and challenge the species- ism of mainstream understandings of (human) rights. Legal developments are, indeed, moving in this direction, with expansions for the recognition of, for example, children, disabled people, Indigenous peoples, and most recently, some nonhuman beings and entities. Here, humans can be viewed as animals among other animals, whose rights emerge from their (our) embodied animal being instead of some abstract humanity placed on top of it. Yet, while the sphere of rights keeps expanding, forms of violence keep finding ways of existing under new names, too. While “statutes outlawing cruelty coexist with the slaughterhouse,” as Deckha reminds us, de facto slavery also coexists with universal human rights.xvii Expanding the rights framework is an important instrument for bringing groups and entities under ethical consideration and holding up the ideal of basic rights, as well as for challenging existing privileges. Yet, instead of looking for rights as the perfect solution, it is also important to investigate the material relations that enable zoopolitical, dehu- manizing violence toward all species. 

If we can view humans as existing on a continuum with other animals in terms of their need for protection, we can also view humans and nonhuman animals as existing on a continuum in terms of oppression. In this view, the categories human and animal appear not as natural groupings but as operations within biopolitical cap- italism that perpetually generate labor force and material to extract from. While it is widely acknowledged that capitalism is in its essence racial, in other words that it relies on racialized populations that are exploited in the periphery of wage labor, it needs to be acknowledged that capitalism is also animal capitalism. The tautology goes as follows: animals are those who can be extracted from; those who can be extracted from are animals. The use value of a body for capitalist production is not species dependent: capitalism needs all kinds of bodies for all kinds of labor. And throughout the history of capitalism, nonhuman animals and people excluded from humanity have been laboring side by side, pulling, pushing, carrying, in different rela- tionships to freedom and bondage, building the world we all now inhabit. Alongside wage labor, itself a form of unfreedom, there has always existed the shadow labor of women and other birthing beings, who reproduce life in the form of new laborers and because of that never quite fully own their own bodies. The necro- and biopolitics of animal capitalism not only make live but force billions of animals into agonizing existence, while millions of people and nonhuman animals are let die as a result of pollu- tion or loss of livable land, or because they are deemed worthless to production. 

Today, there’s not a single place on earth not impacted by exploited animal labor, nor a field of production that would not be entangled with what Nicole Shukin calls capitalism’s carnal traffic in animal substances; and there is not a place on earth that is not impacted by the animalization that the white supremacist ideal of humanity relies on.xviii If the position of animals in the face of law is not founded on any essential characteristics in them, the position of racialized people as the other of the white supremacist figure of the human is obviously not founded on any essential characteristics either. The infamous example of the three-fifths compromise is a case in point. While it was beneficial for the slaveholding states to count the enslaved as people when it came to the number of state representatives in federal elections, for the purposes of taxation, the less populous the state, the better. The resulting compromise (counting the slave population as “three fifths of all other persons”) demonstrates how the laws of economics, rather than the laws of nature, decide on inclusion and exclusion, and how belonging to humanity is a question of belonging to the political community rather than of belonging to a species.

When Frederick Douglass writes how the violence imposed on him resembles the violence he in turn is expected to impose on the oxen, what he is describing is not a similarity between him and the animal but the relation to power they share.xix It is not that nonhumans can be caged: it is the cage that constructs the non-human, as well as the human outside the cage. And so, following Maneesha Deckha, to try to protect people from dehumanization by resorting to human rights does not make sense if the category of human has been constructed by excluding from it racialized others. Instead of trying to establish justice on a negation of yet new others, what emerges is a possibility for recognizing animality as a structural position that calls for not only multiracial but multispecies class struggle. 

…..


Throughout Western history, museums have been central for managing and reinforcing the white supremacist, patriarchal human-animal boundary. Just the fact that there exist separate museums for “natural” and “cultural” histories establishes these institutions as sites of contest. The campaign to remove representations of Indigenous people from the American Museum of Natural History in New York is one example of this struggle against dehumanization. In a simultaneous move, natural history museums today increasingly describe nonhuman animals as having cultures, moving away from reductive representations. The question remains, however, whether an institution that has been birthed by a colonial, white supremacist culture as a device for this boundary making can be decolonized, in other words cleansed of this exact practice. For a museum always speaks to select groups as its audience, and through this calls them into being as subjects for whom, and from whose perspective, the story of “us” is told. Memorial museums, in turn, can include those already lost by recognizing their passing as grievable, and through this recognition situate them as reminders of a line never to be crossed again. What if, instead of pitting human and nonhuman histories of animalization against each other, the boundary-making practice itself was placed in a museum, with a declaration “never again”? 

Museum of Nonhumanity, a touring project by Gustafsson&Haapoja, is a utopian memorial museum for commemorating all the victims of the human-animal boundary and the logic of exclusion it sustains. The project’s exhibit, a ten-channel video installation that runs through seventy minutes, consists solely of archival images, encyclopedia entries, and dictionary entries that function as evidence of this conceptual boundary making that precedes physical violence. Focusing on different optics, political scenarios, and motivations, the Museum explores how definitions of animality and nonhumanity function as justification for violence and exploitation of beings of all species in Western history. Instead of being an archive of violent instances, the Museum is an archive of mechanisms and strategies, reasonings, and ideologies that mobilize these categories. Through overlapping stories and rhetorical examples, the exhibit presents animality as a central device for all oppression, a device that is characterized by the fact that it’s not bound to any characteristics but can be bent any way power wants at any given moment. From this bending the self-declared Anthropos, the protagonist of the Anthropocene, builds its unfounded power. 

Museum of Nonhumanity is real in the same way all museums are real: its truth value depends on whether people collectively believe in it. Simultaneously, by appropriating the form of a museum, it hails the visitor into being as a subject for whom the Museum is real. Thus the Museum temporarily transforms the world—the whole world!—into one where the human-animal boundary has been placed into a museum and locked into the past. It doesn’t present an alternative to the Anthropos, but destabilizes it so that new modalities of being human can be articulated—while also posing the question of who is the “we” that the Museum, or any museum, speaks for. In each of its iterations, programming by local artists, thinkers, and activists invites others to join in this work. 


Gustafsson&Haapoja 

The exhibitions, stage work and publications of Gustafsson&Haapoja focus on issues that arise from the anthropocentric worldview of Western traditions. Their first large scale exhibition, Museum of the History of Cattle (2013), presents world his- tory from a bovine perspective; the accompanying book History According to Cattle was published in 2015. The participatory courtroom performance The Trial (2014) explored the notion of nonhuman legal personhood and rights of nature. Museum of Nonhumanity, a touring museum that presents a history of the human-animal binary and how it has been used to oppress beings of all kinds, opened in Helsinki in 2016 and has since toured in Italy, Taiwan, Norway, Denmark, and the UK. The sound installation Waiting Room (2019) and their most recent work Pigs (2021) explore the biopolitics of industrial animal agriculture. Becoming (2020) is a three-channel, three-hour video installation that presents emergent notions of being human that have been shadowed in the Western worldview. 

References 

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 

Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Benjamin, David, and David Komlos. “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does, Not What It 

Claims to Do.” Forbes, September 13, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjaminkomlos /2021/09/13/the-purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does-not-what-it-claims-to-do/ ?sh=52dce3e3887a. 

Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. New York: Verso, 2020. Colebrook, Claire. “The Future Is Already Deterritorialized.” In Deterritorializing the Future: 

Heritage in, of, and after the Anthropocene, edited by Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling, 346–83. London: Open Humanities Press, 2020. 

Deckha, Maneesha. “The Subhuman as a Cultural Agent of Violence.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8, no. 3 (2010): 28–51. 

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Project Gutenberg, release date January 1995. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/202/202-h/202-h.htm. 

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. 

Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919 -3615934. 

Hyun, Insoo, Amy Wilkerson, and Josephine Johnston. “Embryology Policy: Revisit the Fourteen-Day Rule.” Nature 533 (2016): 169–71. https://www.nature.com/articles /533169a#/b7. 

Ko, Aph, and Syl Ko. Aphro-Ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. New York: Lantern Books, 2017. 

Kymlicka, Will. “Human Rights without Human Supremacism.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 6 (2018): 763–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2017.1386481. 

Lumme, Hanna. “Tutkimus: Hennalan vankileirillä tapettiin mielivaltaisesti yli 200 naista— nuorimmat 14-vuotiaita.” 2016. https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8775599. 

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene; or, The Geological Color Line.” In After Extinction, edited by Richard Grusin, 123–50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 

Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080 /03066150.2016.1235036. 

Pekkalainen, Tuulikki. Susinartut ja pikku immet: Sisällöissodan tuntemattomat naiset. Helsinki: Tammi, 2011. 

Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 

iLumme, Tutkimus. 

iiPekkalainen, Susinartut ja pikku immet. Ilmari Kianto’s text appeared in the newspaper Keskisuomalainen on April 4, 1918. 

iiiSee Moore, “The Capitalocene”; Mirzoeff, “It’s Not the Anthropocene”; and Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene.” 

ivAgamben, The Open.

vKymlicka, “Human Rights without Human Supremacism,” 764. 

viKymlicka, “Human Rights without Human Supremacism,” 780. 

viiHyun, Wilkerson, and Johnston, “Embryology Policy.” 

viiiDeckha, “The Subhuman as a Cultural Agent of Violence,” 45. 

ixColebrook, “The Future Is Already Deterritorialized,” 346. 

x Colebrook, “The Future Is Already Deterritorialized,” 357. 

xiColebrook, “The Future Is Already Deterritorialized,” 347. 

xiiSee, for example, Butler, The Force of Nonviolence; Agamben, Homo Sacer; and Agamben, The Open.

xiiiBenjamin and Komlos, “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does.” The phrase was coined by the cybernetician and theorist Stafford Beer. 

xivDeckha, 2010, 46 – 47. 

xvKo and Ko, Aphro-Ism, 124. 

xviKymlicka, “Human Rights without Human Supremacism,” 767.

xviiDeckha, “The Subhuman as a Cultural Agent of Violence,” 33.

xviiiShukin, Animal Capital, 7.

xixDouglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 13. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 165. 

Back to works

UPCOMING

Feb 18, 2025
Talk: Animals, Biocapital and Left Politics
Art Laboratory Berlin

Feb 26, 2025
Keynote lecture: Ihmiskeskeisyyttä purkamassa
Puistokatu 4, Helsinki

April 15, 2025
Keynote, Münster Lectures
Kunstakademie Münster, Germany

April 29, 2025
Roundtable: What’s Left for the Animals
CUNY Graduate Center, New York

June 8, 2025
Exhibition: Working Animal’s Party
Kulttuurikeskus Stoa, Helsinki


PAST

Dec 12 2024 
Online lecture
LuoTo-Hanke, Inspiraatiota kestävyystyöhön -luentosarja

Nov 5, 2024 
Lecture: What’s Left for the Animals
Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki

Oct 9 2024
Lecture
What’s Left for the Animals
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Albany, NY

Sep 2023 
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Waiting Room
Exhibition: Animal Power
Montoro12 Gallery, Brussels

Jun 2023 
Inhale-Exhale
Permanent exhibition: Periferia
Hyytiälä Forest Station 

April 2024 
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Embrace Your Empathy
Exhibition: How to Look at Nature
Croatian Association of Visual Artists 

April 13 – June 29 
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Untitled (Alive)
Exhibition: Little John
Pragovka gallery, Prague

March 22. 2023 
To Be Given Over
Performance: Multiplie Festival Trondheim 
In collaboration with WAUHAUS 

Oct 22, 2022
Symposium: Visitations: Art, Agency and Belonging
Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland

Sep 22, 2022 – Jan 31, 2023
Exhibition: Synthetic Ecology
BATB, Beijing Art and Technology Biennale, Beijing

14.9. 2022 Helsinki
LECTURE
Studia Generalia Lecture series

Sep 7-11. 2022
Venice Climate Camp
Art for Radical Ecologies workshop

Sep 10. 2022 – 14.1. 2023
Exhibition: And I Trust You
Miettinen Collection, Berlin

May 2. 2022
LECTURE
University of Oregon

March 30 – Sep 9. 2022
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Museum of the History of Cattle
Exhibition: Visual Natures
MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon

Oct 3 – Nov 30. 2021
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Becoming
Bucharest Biennale

Sept 29. 2021  – Jan 8. 2022
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Siat – Pigs
SOLO EXHIBITION: Seinäjoki Kunsthalle

Sept 24. 2021 – Jan 9. 2022
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Becoming
Exhibition / The World as We Don’t Know It
Droog Gallery, Amsterdam

Sept 2 – Oct 17 2021
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Becoming
SOLO EXHIBITION / Display Gallery
Fotograf Festival, Prague

Sept 2 – Oct 10 2021
Gustafsson&Haapoja
Exhibition: Living Matter
The New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscov

Sept 16 – Oct 3. 2021
Exhibition: From Seeing to Acting

Sept 1 – Oct 17 2021
Exhibition: Intensive Places at Tallinn Photomonth

Aug 31 – Dec 3 2021
Exhibition: Earthly Observatory
SAIC gallery, Chicago

Jun 12 – Nov 28. 2021
Gustafsson&Haapoja
Exhibition: Science Friction – Living Amongst Companion Species
CCCB, Barcelona

Aug 20 – Sept 5. 2021
Exhibition: Aistit – Senses | Coming to Our Senses
Helsinki Kunsthalle
Aisit – Senses

May 22 – June 8. 2021
Exhibition: Aistit – Senses | Resonant Bodies
Kindl, Berlin
Aistit – Senses 

May 22 – Aug 1. 2021
Exhibition: Aistit – Senses | When Our Eyes Touch
Maison Louis Carré, Paris
Aistit – Senses 

Feb 6 – May 9. 2021
SOLO EXHIBITION / Gustafsson&Haapoja: The Museum of the History of Cattle
Kalmar konstmuseum

Jan 30 – Mar 21. 2021
SOLO EXHIBITION / Gustafsson&Haapoja: Becoming
Kyoto University Arts Gallery @KCUA

Nov 1. – Dec 6. 2020
SOLO EXHIBITION / Muse – Dialogues on Love and Art
Gallery Forum Box, Helsinki

June 2. 2020 – Jan 17. 2021
SOLO EXHIBITION / Gustafsson&Haapoja: Museum of Becoming
HAM Helsinki Art Museum / Helsinki Biennial

Oct 10-Dec 16. 2019
SOLO EXHIBITION / Between Thingness and Being
Gallery@calitz, UC San Diego

Oct 5 – Dec 5. 2019
EXHIBITION/ Research: Nature/Life
The European Center for Art Upper Bavaria
www.schafhof-kuenstlerhaus.de

Sept 8- Nov 15. 2019
SOLO EXHIBITION / Waiting Room / Gustafsson&Haapoja
Exhibition of a new commission by Zone2Source, Amsterdam
Gallery Zone2Source

Aug 25-Sept 30. 2019
EXHIBITION / The Archive of Nonhumanity / Gustafsson&Haapoja
Sixty-Eight Art InstituteCopenhagen, Denmark

Aug 15 -Sep 15. 2019
EXHIBITION / Embrace Your Empathy / Gustafsson&Haapoja
Wäinö Aaltosen Museo, Turku

June 15-2019
EXHIBITION
Eco-Visionaries, Matadero, Madrid

April 26. 2019 – March 1.2020
EXHIBITION
Coexistence
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

Feb 5. 2019
TALK
GIDEST Seminar
The New School, New York

March 18. 2019
TALK
School of the Art Institute of Chicago SAIC

Feb 21. 2019
PANEL
How to Live: EARTH
The 8th Floor, New York
Organised by Leonore Malen

Feb 12. 2019
ROUNDTABLE
Ecology as Intrasectionality– Radicalising Arts of Climate Justice
NYU Barney Bld, Einstein Auditorium, New York 7pm

Feb 2-24. 2019
EXHIBITION
Earth Rights
Kunsthalle Turku

Nov 17. 2018 – March 10. 2019
EXHIBITION / Museum of Nonhumanity / Gustafsson&Haapoja
Taipei Biennale
Museum of Nonhumanity

Oct 24. 2018
TALK
Kenyon College, Ohio

Aug 30 – Nov 11. 2018
EXHIBITION
Eco-Visionaries – New Media and Ecology After the Anthropocene
House of Electronic Arts Basel

Aug 25 – Nov 25. 2018
EXHIBITION / Gustafsson&Haapoja
And Tomorrow And
Index Gallery, Stockholm

Aug 16. 2018
TALK
Turner Contemporary, UK

Jul 14 – Sept 1. 2018
EXHIBITION
You Are Just a Piece of Action – Works from the Miettinen Collection
Salon Dalhman, Berlin

Jun 26 – Aug 17. 2018
EXHIBITION
The Shores of the World (communality and interlingual politics)
Display gallery, Prague

Jun 18. 2018
Keynote Lecture
InSEA Congress, Aalto University, Helsinki

May 25 – Sep 30. 2018
EXHIBITION / The Archive of Nonhumanity / Gustafsson&Haapoja
Animals and Us
Turner Contemporary, UK

April 27. 2018
TALK
Why Do Animal Studies Now
Conference, Chicago

April 20.2018
TALK
Queens College, Social Practice Queens, New York

Feb 11. 2018
DISCUSSION
Unlearning Dystopias – Ecotopia
Art in General, New York

Jan 27. 2018
SYMPOSIUM
Beyond Binaries – Towards New Constructs of Personhood and Gender
ISCP New York

Nov 11.2017
TALK
SLSA Conference Out of Time
Arizona Stte University, Phoenix

Sept 22-23. 2017
SOLO EXHIBITION AND BOOK PREVIEW
ANTI-Festival, Kuopio

Sept 11- Dec 23. 2017
EXHIBITION
Gravitation
Salon Dalhman, Berlin

Jun 16- Jul 10. 2017
SOLO EXHIBITION
Museum of Nonhumanity
Santarcangelo Festival, Italy

Jun 16 – Oct 1. 2017
EXHIBITION
Museum of Nonhumanity
Momentum Biennale, Norway

Jun 3 – Sept 3. 2017
SOLO EXHIBITION
Closed Circuit – Open Duration
Chronus Art Center, Shanghai

Jun 3. 2017
TALK
Chronus Art Center, Shanghai

Mar 6. 2017
BOOK LAUNCH
Next Helsinki – Public Alternatives to Guggeheim’s Model of Culture Driven Development
Institute for Public Knowledge, NYU, New York

Nov 2. 2016 – Jan 27. 2017
EXHIBITION
Animal Mirror
ISCP New York

Oct 14 – 16. 2016
TALK
Creative Time Summit DC

Sept 1-30. 2016
SOLO EXHIBITION
Gustafsson&Haapoja: Museum of Nonhumanity
Helsinki

Haastattelu: Maailma on Eläinten työllä rakennettu 
Eläinoikeusakatemia, 2024

“We Belong to the Microbes”
Ferment Radio, 2023

In the Studio: Terike Haapoja
Collectors Agenda, 2020
Text Rasmus Kyllönen

‘Art as a practice of vulnerability’
– A Conversation with Terike Haapoja of the artist duo Gustafsson & Haapoja
Metropolis M, 27.01.2021. Text Alice Smits

Interspecies Politics, Animality and Silence
Terike Haapoja and Pablo José Ramírez in conversation
In: Infrasonica, April 2020


Witnessing Mortality
– On Duration, Being-With and the Anthropocene 
Heather Davis in conversation with Terike Haapoja 
In: Vulnerability, Animality, Community (Garret, 2020)


HD: How did you come to work on these subjects and themes, of animals and natureculture and mortality? 

TH: I grew up in the countryside where I was completely immersed in a natural environment that was inhabited by all kinds of species. When I started to work with art I always had an issue with visual representations as two dimensional images, because I felt that a kind of spatial material connect- edness to my surroundings was far more accurate a reflection of how I actually experienced reality. At some point I then discovered imaging technologies such as the infrared camera, and that was the first media that I somehow got, because it reveals its quality as a mediator. You can’t look through it; instead you face a very material surface that’s translating the reality outside your senses. So the question of how we know the world through these sensory interfaces was already there. Entropy was the first video work I made with this technology. I still feel it’s really important to me. 

A more personal path to that work is that there was a death in my family at the time and I felt an urgency to deal with the experience. Through this work I tried to understand this process of someone being a subject and transforming into being an object, without anything visible changing, a process that is almost incomprehensible to us, and to make it tangible. 

I think these two approaches, the formal and the personal opened a door to a lot of things that then followed, that had to do with how to interpret external reality and how to engage with the world beyond our experiences or beyond our understanding through these technologies, but also with how our connection to the world is deeply human in that it is emotional and personal, too. 

HD: I was looking back through your work and reading this beautiful book, which is actually a long conversation between Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. In it Donna Haraway says: “From my point of view the affirmation of dying seems absolutely fundamental. Affirmation not in the sense of glorifying death, but in the sense – to put it bluntly – that without mortality we’re nothing. In other words the fantasy of transcend- ing death is opposed to everything I care about.”1 And I think that this really resonates with your work, especially with your earlier work includ- ing Entropy, The Present, Community and Inhale – Exhale as well as the fetus images in Mind Over Matter Over Mind. 

There is something really interesting about the ways in which you are taking up the processes of mortality. You require the viewer to actually sit and be with the creature who is losing heat, who is going through this process of death. I was really intrigued when I noticed that both Entropy and In and Out of Time are long: In and Out of Time is four and an half hours and Entropy is 25 minutes. Even 25 minutes is fairly long for a gallery piece. It’s a long amount of time for an audience member to sit and be with the work. But I think there’s something really important about that length of time. It forces this kind of witnessing and asks of the viewer to be in a temporal space that’s more akin to the reality of death, even though both of those pieces are still really sped up. There’s something about the fact of the works’ duration that I think is really important in terms of witnessing mortality. 

TH: The shooting of those pieces have always been like wakes beside the bodies I’m with. It was important for me to repeat that process in the work. I think that a very core function of art is to provide interfaces through which we can be in relation to that which we cannot understand. In that sense it has to do with spirituality. I’m not religious, but I think these metaphors or these symbolic spaces allow us to form a relation to something we cannot ever rationally or cognitively understand – things such as the disappearance of subjectivity, which we can never really experience. 

HD: It is hard not to see these works without thinking of the ongoing massive extinctions of plants, animals and human entangled ways of life. The extinction of a species is often visualized not as the death of a particular individual, but as the disappearance of a mass, a genus. And what I like about your approach to this topic is the way you’re asking the viewer to be witness to the death of a particular creature. I realize that some of the infrared works aren’t necessarily directly related to the theme of extinction, but Community, which is kind of an amalgamation of much of the infrared works, is. When you’re asking the viewer to witness the transformation of a creature from subjectivity to a community of bacteria and other creatures that start taking hold of a body after it’s no longer its own… there is some- thing about being with an individual that I think implicates the viewer in a different way than witnessing something en mass. 

TH: I think forming emotional connection is necessary – I don’t know if you can say it’s necessary in order to evoke action. It’s not action that I try to evoke with my work directly, especially not with these works, but rather some kind of emotional connection that’s related to one’s own body and one’s own life experience as a being. It’s not anthropomorphization, it’s more a realization of the fact that we are bodily and that is what we share. 

HD: The way that you approach these questions of mortality and the limits of knowledge, and the cyclical nature of time are infused with a lot of ethics, and Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking in particular. You even cite him when you say, in relation to The Presence: “The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas describes the inner sense of time as a foundation of an ethical encounter. The other is not merely an object in my time, she or he also has a past and a future that are not accessible to me.” The passage from life to death in a lot of ways is the passage from being in time to no longer being in time, to not being bound by the passage of time. I think that there’s also a way in which you ask the viewer to just be in this durational moment with another creature. Despite the fact that Levinas never extends his ethics to other creatures I think there’s something about the ways in which he conceptualizes ethics that seems to inform so much of your work. 

TH: His ideas have been important, especially exactly those parts of his think- ing about time. Another book that affected me a lot back when I started my studies was Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. It’s kind of an art school cliché. But it contains the kind of analysis of a medium that is about our existential being in the world that I felt I could relate to as an artist. He doesn’t just provide a semiotic theory, but opens up this space where it becomes visible how meanings are bound to our emotional, human exis- tence in the world. Through my early experiences of nature I’ve gained a very strong sense that this kind of being in the world is something that exists for all life forms, not just for humans. 

HD: In “Involutionary Momentum” scholars Natasha Myers and Carla Hustak talk about orchids and Darwin, and the ways in which Darwin had to embody the movements of an insect in order to get the orchids to react. There’s a communicational system that is real amongst all kinds of non-human crea- tures, including plants, where they can warn other plants about the infesta- tion of particular insects and alter their bodily chemistry in order to get rid of insects that might be feeding on them. There’s such an amazing respon- siveness and a kind of knowledge about the world in them that it’s hard to think that the ways in which we use language are exceptional. 

TH: The exhibition Closed Circuit – Open Duration was really a manifestation of the idea that when beings are born into time they are also born into mean- ings and meaningfulness. There was one work that was not really an inde- pendent piece but it was still very important for me to include in the exhibi- tion. The work consists of a video animation of a quote from the book Writing by Marguerite Duras. In that particular chapter she is trying to describe witnessing the death of a fly. It’s as if she’s trying to access that experience through language, and even if it’s impossible it is still a trial to bring meanings into a shareable form. I wanted to address this aspect of existence also, and not just our material connectedness. Natural sciences work so much on a reductionist basis where everything you can measure is pulled into the cumulative system of knowledge. And I feel that’s also one reason why, even though there is a danger of anthropomorphization, it is still very important to address the subjective and the particular, too. 

HD: Bruno Latour has talked a lot throughout his career about the liveliness of the ways in which scientists describe the creatures that they’re work- ing with. Despite the fact that there is this tendency, within a Western scientific epistomology, to say that this or that is just an automatic response, in the writing of the scientific documents there are moments where the liveliness of the world betrays the impulse to scientific objectivism. For Latour there’s always a tension in scientific work between those two modalities. I think a lot of scientists, especially biologists or ethologists study what they do because of the fact that they are deeply attached to these creatures or plants. 

Philosopher of science Vinciane Despret describes the ways in which the creatures that scientists are working with have meaning systems and have their own schematics of interpretation. Lab rats, for example, are actually interpreting what you are doing to them, and have their own meaning systems around what the experiments are. But they can get bored and start to be uncooperative, so coming up with better scientific results is about develop- ing a relationship with an animal. In the case of Darwin and his orchids, he’s developing a relationship with an orchid while trying to figure out what an orchid will respond to and what an orchid won’t respond to. It actually requires that kind of deep engagement that I think necessarily has to also be emotional, even if in the scientific literature that part often gets taken out. 

Could you describe what it was like to put together the Closed Circuit – Open Duration show and your collaboration with the scientists? 

TH: I had been working with infrared and ultrasound imaging technologies in the works that dealt with disappearance and death and that which is beyond life. Then I started to think that I want to use these scientific media as interfaces between organic processes that you usually see as somehow inert or dead – which of course they are not – and to allow for a real-time ethical relationship with the work and the viewer to take place. I started to work on this exhibition in 2007, and at that time there was not that much discourse around these issues. I first exhibited this show in 2008, and updated the work for the Venice Biennale in 2013. 

During the initial research I found these incredible people from Helsinki University, such as ecologist Eija Juurola and engineer Toivo Pohja, who has been hand-building measuring devices for Helsinki University’s Hyytiälä Forestry Field Station for decades. It was fascinating to see how, for exam- ple, research on the carbon cycle is conducted through these small scale experiments where they measure the fixing of carbon from a single branch of a tree, and then make this huge generalization of that data. Science is so much about making generalizations. In that sense, the particular tree func- tions merely as a foundation from which that general knowledge is then extracted. I, in contrast, was interested in the particular experience of a particular tree, because our common sense experience of trees is that they are individuals like us. 

The same is true with the work Inhale – Exhale. I ran into this concept of soil respiration that is used in forestry research for describing the process of decomposing, and how in that process carbon is released back into the atmosphere. I found that notion extremely poetic. I started to think of carbon flow and of the fact that we are stardust, as Joni Mitchell puts it. I am part of the carbon cycle and my mortality is a by-product of that cycle. But what my mortality means to me is not something scientific, but very personal. So I created this sculpture that would offer a way of internalizing what the carbon flow means for us as humans, that would include the sceintific reading as well. 

HD: There’s something that I have be interested in lately, which is that our imaginations are increasingly framed by the figure of the molecular. We think about gender in relation to how much estrogen or testosterone we have in our body, we think about the climate through how much carbon or methane is there. I think one of the reasons there is a lack of action around things like climate change is that when you say carbon and methane, or talk through the figure of the molecule, it’s such an abstract thing. I think that what is really interesting about Inhale – Exhale and Dialogue is the ways in which you develop a personal relationship to a molecule. In doing that you actually show how it’s not just about this molecule, but that we’re connected through this cycle of decay. I find it a really potent image. It is anthropomorphizing to a certain degree, but I think that it has to be; we are human after all. There are limits to our understanding. 

The early 20th century biologist Jakob von Uexküll describes the way in which each species has its own world. In Uexküll’s thinking species’ worlds overlap, but they remain distinct. The idea of there being one world is thus false: there’s actually multiple worlds that co-exist side-by-side, intertwined and entangled. Humans live in a world that’s particular to us, because of the ways in which we are able to sense and perceive our environment. Each creature has its own world, and it’s important to recognize that we are not going to be able to move out of our own sensoriums completely. However, I often think of trying to see or feel through other creature’s sensations is a kind of active empathy. This is what a lot of our technologies allow us to do – to extend our sensorium. I also think that that is what your work asks us to do, to make connections with plants and animals on an emotional scale that are enabled through the apparatus of technology and art. I realize that there is a danger in this move, a danger of subsuming the other into the self, but it’s also about trying to find a connection, a shared meaning or commu- nication. And it’s clear, from anyone who has ever paid attention, that it is quite possible to communicate across species. 

HD: There seems to be a difference between some of your earlier work, like the Closed Circuit – Open Duration exhibition, and all the earlier infrared works, and the newer works which are more directly political, like the work by Gustafsson&Haapoja and also The Party of Others. What sparked you to make that kind of turn in your work, or do you see a continuity? 

TH: It’s kind of continuous. After working on the Closed Circuit – Open Duration exhibition I started to feel, again, frustrated by the limits of working in the white cube and making these prototypes of theory. The whole exhibition was a manifestation of my world view in a way, a manifestation of what I thought of as an intertwined, more ethical relationship with the non-human world and our own mortality. I do think that the kind of poetics that these works hopefully can put into play is affecting people and has a political effect. 

But if you think about what actually defines our relationship with the non-hu- man world, it is the law and the way in which the non-human world is actually represented in our decision making processes. And then you can easily see that notions of nature-cultures or hybridity are absent from those structures that in practice define our possibilities to interact with the non-human world. It made sense to look to legislation and parliamentary decision-making processes as sites where nature is really created as “the other”. Because that’s how it is: everything in nature is still considered to be a legal object, whereas almost everything human-made is considered to be a legal person. So I started to look into what it would look like if we brought these radical thoughts into the realm of decision-making. In that sense The Party of Others is a continuation of that line of thought. It’s a utopian project and a platform for thinking of what could be an utopian model of governance where everybody would be represented equally. Of course it’s a way of showing the limitations of representational democracy: a way of demonstrating how the core structures of our society are based on exclusion and how the idea of inclusion is not compatible with the basic idea which is essentially premised on the division between humans and nonhumans. It was a way of looking at how these theories actually radical- ize our whole notion of the state and the nation state, and the way we govern our reality at the moment. 

HD: When you staged the participatory performance The Trial, what were the arguments that were given and how did the jury members react? 

TH: The Trial was a play. We had actors who performed the parts and a script, 

the rights of nature into our legal apparatus. I do think that law is a kind of ultimate reality-creating interface. Art is always somehow distanced from reality and everything you do in art becomes a representation. The only place where you can actually make reality is if you make laws. Because that’s where reality is somehow affected directly or created. The Trial was an attempt trial to show how, if you actually have a different kind of a matrix, a different kind of vocabulary through which you have to make the verdicts, how it actually would change our practical reality. I’m continuing this line of thought through a new project called the Transmodern-Modern Dictio- nary, which is a spin off from The Party of Others project and aims at introducing more ecocentric concepts to Western legislation through collaboration with Indigenous language groups. I do feel that I approach law exactly the same way as I approach an infrared camera: it’s a very material medium that somehow allows us to be in a relationship with the outside world. 

HD: I was just reading about the Transmodern-Modern Dictionary. The new concepts that are used in workshops to rewrite selected passages of relevant local legislation in order to demonstrate how ideas really change political reality is a really brilliant intervention. It highlights the way in which the law itself is a representative medium and how people – judges and lawyers and legislators – are interpreting it constantly. So there’s always this process of representation and interpretation which is happening. The idea of changing the language to demonstrate how that would force a shift in policy is such an interesting idea, because it really ties in with notions of performativity of language itself and how that performativity is so mate- rial. 

TH: We’ve worked very closely with the local community and have tried to be conscious about not just going somewhere and extracting some kind of artistic content from the local people. It’s more of a platform than an art work, though there is this poetic element of translation that I’m really interested in: How to translate thoughts between languages and between cultures, from non-human realities to this very human construct of law. I feel that my expertise is in tweaking that part, which is something that the activists or the legal scholars won’t be focusing on. 

TH: Back when I started to work on these issues over ten years ago, the scene was very marginal. The mainstream art world really didn’t talk about these issues: definitely not about animals, but not even about the Anthropocene or climate crises. All of that was introduced later, in 2006 or 2007. How do you see the whole discourse around the Anthropocene and the booming of all these themes in the arts in recent years? 

HD: I feel that it’s so present in art and contemporary theory simply because we can no longer ignore it. It’s not that in the early 2000s things were sig- nificantly better, but I think that there’s just a growing realization of the situation of ecological crisis. We are now seeing the immediate effects of climate change in a very real way, and are living through the sixth mass extinction event. So ecology becomes an important thing even to people who might not be drawn to these themes otherwise. Philosopher Isabelle Stengers talks about the ways in which “Gaia intrudes,” and I think that this is precisely what’s happening. Gaia is intruding on our imaginaries and our world – on the climatical world, environmental world, social world, on our political worlds. For me, the fact that artists are taking this up is a really good thing. 

Even if it’s incredibly important for there to be political action, I also think it’s important for us to grapple emotionally and psychically with what is happening. Art is one of the best places to do that, because it holds a space where you can have what media theorist and curator Joanna Zylisnka has called an “a-moral response”. She doesn’t mean it in a sense of immoral, but in the sense of a space that can be held together in contradiction, a space of contested realities. I think that in order for us to really begin to imagine the world that is going to be confronting us, we need to have a plurality of vision. For me art is one of the best places to do that. 

TH: It took, depending on how you count it, 400 or 2000 or 10 000 years (laughs) for us to get into this mess. It’s going to take a while for the paradigm to actually change. It’s not going to be over in the next 50 years. Collective thinking is slow. In that sense I feel that I can try to be rigorous in this tiny little space I have. It can effect change only so far, but we can still think that we are part of a bigger wave and that maybe in 100 years or 150 years it will have achieved something. For me this is a good way of not becoming desperate, but also of not freeing me from responsibility. It gives me a place of relief, personally, where I still can be satisfied with doing what I do, and feel that if I can just do the tasks at hand well, that’s enough. 

HD: There’s something good in thinking about these kinds of time scales, and 

in the long duration and being-with quality of your work–of certain videos, like Entropy, but also in terms of projects like The Party of Others and Transmodern – Modern Dictionary. They are taking that long view. Under- standing oneself as just a small part of a much larger system is helpful in terms of orienting ourselves to a much longer term politics. There is a necessity in thinking about political action as sustainable, sustaining over a long period of time. 

TH: I do think it’s important. I was just talking with my father, who is a sculptor. My childhood home is in the woods, and that surrounding has affected both of us very deeply. He said that that presence of that forest is so important to him because it constantly reminds him of eternity, in that silent indifferent way that nature does. And that for him art is a way of managing his relation to that eternity. It’s a very beautiful way of putting it and I can relate to that. 

HD: I love the expression “the silent indifference of nature.” I think that’s something that’s important to keep in mind, when dealing with all these other questions. 

TH: I think that’s a good place to stop. 

–

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Her recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke 2022), argues that plastic is the emblematic material of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how intimately oil has coated nearly every fabric of being, how the synthetic cannot be disentangled from the natural, and how a generalized toxicity is producing queer realities. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017).

Lecture at Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki, 5.11.2024.
Lecture at Puistokatu4, Helsinki, 26.2.2025 (in Finnish)
Presentation at Sonic Acts Academy, 2020.
Presentation at Creative Time Summit DC, 2017.
An interview with Laura Gustafsson at Taipei Biennale, 2018.