http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Davis-Turpin_2015_Art-in-the-Anthropocene.pdf

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“The greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.”

In the exhibition “The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene”, “The artists contest mastery of human power over nature while re-visioning the bond of humans to non-human life”. They approaches the topic Anthropocene in the present tense, while we decided to represent the Post-Anthropocene where human dominance is decreasing and returning to the nature. This is an idea we ponder upon and pose to our audience, whether we can continue the anthropogenic relationship with nature or we will eventually be devoured by nature.

Similar to the exhibition, we also “include raw material, disaster, consumption, loss, justice and the emergence of new and nonhierarchical alliances in human-non-human relations” in our installation. Raw materials such as leaves, tree barks, rocks we gathered from outdoors and biodegradable materials such as tea, starch, glycerin, and vinegar to create the bioplastic mixture. “Loss” of human dominance as well as human-non-human relations is also our main focus in the installation. Human made materials such as iron wires and fabrics, in this case, is slowly decaying(as how it is wobbly and fragile) and covered by the natural materials.

In Laura Hall’s article “My Mother’s Garden: Aesthetics, Indigenous Renewal, and Creativity”, Laura’s mother’s garden is a personal place for creation and collection of cultural background. The garden is a concentrated subject that represents a lot of things. In this case the garden is the installation that can be tweaked throughout time. In our installation, the chair is an object that reminds us of human existence, because as we see a chair, we immediately think of a person sitting on it. So the main object is a representation of humans, or the anthropocene.

The concept of decolonization is also really interesting, it refers to “creating space and time necessary for Indigenous nations to flourish and renew themselves and their land against the toxins of colonization”. Re-contexualizing decolonization in our installation, it is to create space and time for nature to flourish and renew themselves against human colonization. The garden, or the chair, is something that travels and changes as time go by. One quote from the articles is closely relation to our installation, “The Earth herself is a living, breathing, conscious Being, complete with heart/feeling, soul/spirit, and physical/organic life, as it is with all the relatives of creation”. This invites us to reflect on our interconnectedness with the Earth, urging us to nurture and protect the environment where all forms of life can thrive harmoniously in the future.