‘The ‘end of a world’ never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.’
– René Guénon
We are living the sixth mass extinction event. As individuals, some of us are even managing to flourish in it. Perhaps this is the great paradox of our time. I’ve been preoccupied with what it means to live in this particular period of history, which on the surface feels somehow transitional, like an age between ages. It feels that we are rapidly approaching the end of an era largely dominated by the concerns of westernised modernity, an inevitable shift that’s been accelerated by the global environmental emergency and recent developments in technology and communication. A clear picture of what will replace it has not yet emerged, and may remain obscure for several lifetimes. It is not what’s gone before – even with its crucial, attendant questions of moral and spiritual responsibility – nor what comes after – the shipwreck civilisation that will emerge from the ruins of now – that concerns me most. It’s the texture of life in this moment: how it feels to actually inhabit our time, in which the dominant ways of knowing no longer feel truly applicable, and the future no longer stretches ahead like a green and unbroken ribbon. Temporal horizons are shrinking, while margins of uncertainty expand. Many of us were born into this interstitial moment, and will almost certainly die in it: existences marked by patchy cataclysm and suspended collapse.
In much of the Global North, linearity is the dominant conception of time: a continuous and irreversible flow moving in a single direction from the fixed and unchangeable past, through the fleeting present to the unknowable future. Linear cultures are rooted in the idea of progress, the belief that humanity is constantly improving and moving toward a future that will be better than the past. Periodisation, in which history is divided into discrete, successive eras, is embedded within this concept of time as measurable and unidirectional. Extinction, viewed within this time-culture, is underpinned by a particular kind of eschatology, which holds that the end of the world will be brought about by natural disasters as a consequence of human sin or moral decay. Yet if we look back into deep history, it’s clear that we’ve been here before: mass extinctions have occurred throughout Earth’s history, caused by events like asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions. The current mass extinction event is unique, however, because it is happening at a much faster rate than previous events and is the first to be caused by human activity: pollution, exploitative extraction and the destruction of the environment.
From a linear perspective, the onset of this extinction event is marked by porous temporal borders and geographically uneven onset. The realities of the global climate catastrophe are creeping in unevenly, along existing lines of social and geographical inequality. It reinforces them, widening chasms and creating dissonant chronologies and realities. Countries in the Global South are flooded to the point of almost complete submergence, while other parts of the world remain complacent enclaves of seeming unchangedness. Even within globally rich countries, the poorest and most marginalised, who tend to be redlined and chronically underserved with decaying infrastructure, are primed to suffer harsher realities than the rich during extreme weather events. Extinction does discriminate, because it’s not just a biological phenomenon, but a fundamental cultural underpinning of this moment. The philosopher Federico Campagna puts it like this: death is to do with individual bodies, ‘with me and with you… but we will not go extinct… When a species goes extinct, its individual members merely die’. Extinction, on the other hand, is wholly the preserve of groups and categories, in a world ‘increasingly constituted not by living organisms, but by linguistic constructs’.[1]
This linguistic point of departure is useful in differentiating extinction from the simplicity of death, and is reflected in Lou Chapelle’s aptly named ‘Voicing Silence’ (2020/2022). The work comprises two videos projected over one another, onto a double layer of gauze. First appear the forms of vivid paper flowers showing species extinct or on the brink: field fleawort, cry violet, ghost orchid, crown imperial, snake’s-head fritillary. The sound of a persistent heartbeat emerges, then dancers – first as disembodied hands and arms, then faces, formations and dancing groups. The sheer double screen lends a ghostly, diaphanous quality to the figures, who overlap and disappear into one another. A disembodied speaker relays a litany of first-hand testaments to extinction: like the dancing figures, testimonials overlap as they’re recounted aloud, building to a gentle cacophony and pushing against the looming silence.
The video is housed inside a wooden structure, built by the artist to echo the shape of the ‘spirit houses’ found in many countries across Southeast Asia. Spirit houses are small, reverential structures present outside most homes and businesses in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. Their sole purpose is to house the land spirits who were displaced by the buildings: the spirit houses appease and care for the incorporeal dispossessed, providing them reparation in the form of a new home, where they also receive regular offerings. What’s fascinating about the spirit houses is that while they have been absorbed by the predominant religion of Thailand, they’re thought to be folk practices from the older, animistic religion of the country that predated Theravada Buddhism. When viewed in their full religious and cultural context, spirit houses emphasise the spiritual lineage and moral responsibility of land use, and places humans within a fluid ecology of ancestors, beings and spirits, rather than strictly above them. The spirit house embeds that awareness into the community, intertwining it with rituals of symbolic reparation and mindfulness.
For the careful observer, the spirit houses are also repositories of nonlinear time, in forms both cyclical and eternal. There are many cosmologies in which time is not linear and measurable, but instead formed from the endless repetition of events, patterns and cycles. Found in many cultures and traditions, including some aspects of Judaism and Christianity, cyclicality is particularly present in the Buddhist concept of samsara: the infinitely repeated cycles of birth, suffering and death caused by karma. In cyclical views of time the past, present and future are all interconnected, and the events of the present are seen as a repetition of the past, and the future as a repetition of the present. This means that time is abundant, as the same events and opportunities will occur repeatedly, which is in turn a mechanism of eternity. Just as the immortal spirits may reside inside the spirit houses indefinitely, the offerings are never complete: they must be maintained and repeated again and again, with no end point or date of fulfilment.
Chapelle’s structure was built in conversation with the local Wat Phra Singh Buddhist monastery in Runcorn, and led by an ethos of intercultural and interfaith understanding. Chapelle is very clear that the structure is not intended to be a true spirit house, which would need to be consecrated, have particular spiritual and physical features, and could never have people inside them. Instead, the structure draws attention to the spiritual and ethical foundations of the true spirit houses, examines their place in their home culture, and asks how such reverential practices may be drawn upon in the age of the sixth extinction. This symbolism is key to the idea of the artwork, which aims to provide a similarly reverential home to the ghosts of lost and dying species. ‘It was important that the shape of the structure is also a shelter,’ Chapelle told me, ‘It’s about fighting extinction with care’.
Which timescapes could allow for this kind of care? Capitalist linear time, with its insistence on progress, its chronic scarcity, and the way that its assumptions underpin economic growth at the expense of life on Earth, lacks this capacity. Similarly, perhaps single-perspective storytelling cannot fully enact this care, which requires space for many disparate experiences, and centring those most vulnerable. Chapelle’s project has enfolded the specialisms of many collaborators to create a polyvocal project, harnessing the power of many voices to sustain narrative change. Collaborators include composer Jennifer John, sound engineer and producer Dash, movement artist Kali Chandrasegaram, costume designer Rachael Prime, poet Scott Farlow, filmmaker Tim Brunsden and project coordinator Louise McNulty. People who participated in the artistic workshops include local asylum seekers and refugees, some in temporary housing, Wat Phra Singh UK, dancers from Runcorn Men Dancing group in Liverpool, and writing and singing groups in Widnes.
Chapelle told me, ‘I had always felt that extinction didn’t yet affect us directly… Talking to others who’ve experienced it directly quickly shifted my perspective’. The artist stresses the importance of highlighting and enfolding a variety of perspectives into the work, focusing on routinely silenced minority groups and exploring the extinction not just of peoples, plants and animals, but of languages and traditions. The work is intended as a metaphorical home for the many individual experiences and cultural expressions encountered in the workshops. Many of these are also at risk of loss – in some cases because they’re part of vulnerable minority communities whose very presence is precarious in the UK, an environment that can not only be administratively but also culturally hostile to migrant people, and expressions of their home cultures.
From contributions by workshop participants, a multifaceted picture emerges of the global catastrophe, and the lives lived within it. Through vignettes of personal experience, we can see the mass extinction event as the convergence of many crises. In one such account, Ibrahim, an agricultural engineer from Syria, says: ‘extinction is a progression of loss. You know; the ripple in the fabric of the system’. He speaks of his fears for humanity due to the use of GMOs, and the effect of warfare and the changing climate on global biodiversity. In another, Glen from Namibia relays the memory of encounters with the now-extinct white rhino, intertwining the memory with the loss of his language:
‘I speak my language here; usually alone and unheard. My Bantu language is under threat at home across Hereroland and silent or misunderstood elsewhere. My people are declining. When we lose our mother language, we lose a part of ourselves.’
Another contribution, from the Palestinian refugee, poet and writer Naema Aldaqsha:
‘My grandparents went through and witnessed one of the biggest extinction processes of the last century; the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – Al Nakba (The Catastrophe).’
Aldaqsha’s reflection highlights an inescapable truth: that the hegemonic western view of the extinction event, as a distant or imminent future occurrence, is a narrow one. For many, the apocalypse is simultaneously imminent, historical and ongoing: a consequence not just of environmental collapse, but the interrelated crises of colonisation, mass dispossession, and the violent accumulation of capital and unequal distribution of wealth under global capitalism. Aldaqsha’s writing also highlights the dissonance inherent in the prevailing western view of the climate/ extinction crisis as a kind of final rupture, where the dominant cultural principles that produce this view are some of the very causes of the crisis: ‘Monotheistic religions pronounce the human race as the centre of the universe, which, ultimately, leads to extinction’.
***
The climate crisis demands a shift away from linear time, towards a form that prioritises repair, maintenance and care. There are many models for this, and one that I return to frequently is Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘women’s time’ which proposes differences in the ways that women experience and perceive time compared to men. It suggests that women’s experiences of time are often shaped by their societally assigned roles and responsibilities, such as domestic labour and childcare, and that these responsibilities can result in a different perception of time. In this sense, I find women’s time to be intertwined with cyclical time, as the repetitive nature of care and maintenance work – incidentally, work that is devalued under the incessant linear growth-trajectory required by capitalism – can create a sense of time as a cycle of repetition, with similar tasks repeated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The work is not strictly limited to women, as many maintenance, repair and service jobs like waste collection, cleaning, nursing, customer service and care work could fall under its domain. The trivialisation of this work also contributes to those who perform it being trapped in a cycle of devaluation, where their labour is neither properly remunerated nor fully acknowledged.
In cyclic time, the future is not a discrete and untouchable climactic chapter, but always immanent within the present. This quality is captured in works like Voicing Silence, which aims to shape our narrativisation of the unfolding moment. It is the second iteration of the artistic and public-facing component of Thinking Through Extinction, an AHRC-funded project conceived by Stefan Skrimshire (University of Leeds) and led in collaboration with Dominic O’Key (University of Sheffield). The project’s stated aim is to ‘explore the responses to such an ethically complex and emotionally consuming phenomenon [as extinction], by people whose voices are rarely heard on the topic’. I was struck by how the collaborative aspect of Chapelle’s project had evidently changed the artist’s practice and attitudes, forming a non-didactic, art-pedagogical cycle between artists and participants. It left me wanting more, asking – what could a subsequent iteration of a project like this look like? How could the structures governing the project be flattened more radically, to produce a work in which the experiences of many are not folded into single authorship/artistic direction? I wanted to see how this project might look if the collaborative and participatory elements with local groups were brought in at a higher level, with their members and concerns driving the direction of the project, rather than simply illustrating, enriching or providing material for it.
Alternative time models are all around us. In my day-to-day life, the patterns most indicative of cyclical time can be found in the natural world: seasons, tides, lunar cycles, plant growth and animal migration, as well as oceanic weather patterns like the North Atlantic Oscillation. I live on a major bird migration route and the return of seasonal visitors, the annual batches of new sparrows in the garden, the biannual metamorphosis of the starlings’ coats and their winter murmurations are all occurrences that contain the seeds of eternity, essential anchors that help me resist the hardness of hegemonic time. While the birds’ lives are cyclical, it is the species as a whole that reoccurs infinitely, its individual members living only brief, luminous lives. It is these species and their life-patterns that are threatened by the climate catastrophe, which is impeding their reproduction and knocking their cycles into elliptical shapes. The local tidal river is another time model, its twice-a-day pulse reinforcing the ninety-first fragment of Heraclitus: ‘You will not go down twice to the same river’. Its water flows constantly outward, periodically replaced by the tides and rain in an ongoing cycle of journey and return, yet from land it appears eternal.
Revelation is embedded inside the word ‘apocalypse’, which comes to us (via the Latin apocalypsis) from the Ancient Greek root ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis), ‘revelation’ – literally ‘uncovering’. Perhaps the sense of temporal unease that seems to be such an affective marker of this transitional moment is due in part to the illusory linear timescape we’ve inhabited for so long, which demands measurable headway and strives for the realisation of an end goal. The encroaching extinction event shows us that the hitherto dominant ideals of stability and progress are and always have been subjective, uneven and illusory; that the shapes of the future, past and present exist inside one another, and that transition and flow are constant. Perhaps rather than struggle to resist or somehow ‘complete’ the transition between eras, we might instead turn to presence, leaning into the palpable historiographic rupture of the present and learning to feel its contours. One method for this might be found in the type of work modelled by the spirit houses: that of service, maintenance, offering and devotion, which by its nature is never truly complete.
‘Voicing Silence’ will appear at a launch event on 20 March as part of the Go Green Salford programme, tickets here. The Autumn/ Winter 2022 tour included: The Studio, Widnes; Leeds Light Night (The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds); Light Up Lancaster (The Storey, Meeting House Lane); Wigan Light Night (Wigan Pier); and Halton Greenhouse and Butterfly House, with further locations planned in 2023. Created with artists and Global Majority groups in the North West, it is the second iteration of a collaborative work commissioned by the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds as part of an AHRC-funded project, Thinking Through Extinction.
Visit the linktree for project links, previous iterations, toolkits for educators and activists, and climate anxiety self-care. Watch the full (flattened) video of ‘Voicing Silence (2022)’ here (subtitled in English, French, Arabic and Persian).
Jay Drinkall is a writer and editor based in the UK.
[1] Federico Campagna, ‘The Root of Extinction’, Serpentine Extinction Marathon, 2014 (https://youtu.be/lYz3bFUy6RM).
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Published 14.03.2023 by Lara Eggleton in Explorations
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