TY - CHAP

T1 - Curating a mild apocalypse

T2 - researching anthropocene ecologies through analytical figures

AU - Brichet, Nathalia Sofie

AU - Hastrup, Frida

PY - 2019/3

Y1 - 2019/3

N2 - On the basis of our exhibition “Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark” (2016) we discuss how we curated insights generated in a collaborative cross-disciplinary research project about a former mining site in Denmark. We approach this industrially disturbed and radically altered landscape as an effect of the so-called Anthropocene era, but one which is in a sense insignificant and undramatic – a mild apocalypse. This poses a challenge to both our anthropological research and our curatorial practices: how do we bring the Anthropocene home and draw attention to the inconspicuous disasters that often go unnoticed? We argue that exhibition work when practiced as a form of research provides an opportunity for turning “trivial” environmental disaster into sensational experience by deliberately playing with objects to make what we think of as analytical figures. That is, exhibition artefacts created and displayed neither as representational ethnographic objects nor as free-floating art work, but as unsettled think pieces that are at once familiar and strange. We suggest that a feature of the Anthropocene is that ecologies have been messed up so as to become unrecognizable – and that research-based curating must follow suit by creating novel objects, thereby making exhibitions into provisional analyses and blurring conventional lines between art galleries and museums of cultural history.

AB - On the basis of our exhibition “Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark” (2016) we discuss how we curated insights generated in a collaborative cross-disciplinary research project about a former mining site in Denmark. We approach this industrially disturbed and radically altered landscape as an effect of the so-called Anthropocene era, but one which is in a sense insignificant and undramatic – a mild apocalypse. This poses a challenge to both our anthropological research and our curatorial practices: how do we bring the Anthropocene home and draw attention to the inconspicuous disasters that often go unnoticed? We argue that exhibition work when practiced as a form of research provides an opportunity for turning “trivial” environmental disaster into sensational experience by deliberately playing with objects to make what we think of as analytical figures. That is, exhibition artefacts created and displayed neither as representational ethnographic objects nor as free-floating art work, but as unsettled think pieces that are at once familiar and strange. We suggest that a feature of the Anthropocene is that ecologies have been messed up so as to become unrecognizable – and that research-based curating must follow suit by creating novel objects, thereby making exhibitions into provisional analyses and blurring conventional lines between art galleries and museums of cultural history.

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9780815370062

T3 - Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions

SP - 120

EP - 132

BT - Curatorial challenges

A2 - Vest Hansen, Malene

A2 - Folke Henningsen, Anne

A2 - Gregersen, Anne

PB - Routledge

CY - London

ER -