Privileging Non-Human Persistence

During her digital residency in partnership with Art Volt and Érudit, Olivia Vidmar explored the concept of “third nature.” Drawing on ideas from anthropology, art history, and conservation, the author analyzes how artists and theorists challenge anthropocentrism, prioritize horizontal relationships with living beings, and propose forms of care based on relinquishing control, loss, and what she calls the “non-human persistence.”

In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers the term “third nature” to describe where mycelium networks, known to flourish in hostile and seemingly nutrient-devoid environments, thrive. Third nature names entanglements between human intervention and non-human life that result in places or systems neither entirely uninterrupted by capitalist infrastructure (first nature) nor fully controlled by humans (second nature). Life in urban peripheries, abandoned industrial sites, and post-extraction landscapes exists in the liminality of third nature, or “what manages to live despite capitalism.”1 1  - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), viii. What roles can artists and curators play in these environments shaped by complex, anthropogenic histories where humans are no longer central?

During this residency, I combed through Esse and Érudit archives, searching for strategies utilized by artists and curators to grapple with such contexts. How do they attend to the assemblages of life forms, relationships, and ecologies that persist, adapt, or thrive in the ruins left by capitalist transformations? My questions are informed by a curatorial approach to ruinous or historical milieus that are vulnerable to entropy and open to non-human ecologies. Rather than resisting loss and prioritizing preservation, what the cultural geographer Caitlin DeSilvey calls “palliative curation” offers an alternate route for an intentional ending to presumed human dominance over them. In the gap between abandonment and attention, palliative curation embraces the breakdown of matter and proposes that care for these environments can be found in the relinquishment of control.² 2 - Caitlin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage beyond Saving (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 21. For example, in the case of a beloved, decommissioned lighthouse at risk of imminent loss due to coastal erosion, DeSilvey proposes a shift in perspective. If we understand the lighthouse as a process rather than as a static thing to be preserved, we may locate its persistence in how its matter becomes part of other physical, material, cultural, and social systems and processes—the last two conditions perhaps being the most enduring.³ 3 - Caitlin DeSilvey, “Palliative Curation and Future Persistence: Life after Death,” in Cultural Heritage and the Future, ed. Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg (London: Routledge, 2021), 225.