Amid revelry in the wreckage of natural and fiscal catastrophes at the Multispecies Salon exhibit, many visitors failed to notice an unassuming wooden box resting on the floor of The Ironworks. This box, Bryan Wilson’s Monument to the Future, contained a dark vision of a time when “everything is going to be fine” for certain species, even if human life has ceased to exist.
A field of cratered black glass is housed in the box. Devoid of all plant and animal life, the miniature scene prefigures a possible future after nuclear winter. At first glance, this landscape blasted by nuclear warheads appears to be bleak and desolate. More careful attention reveals that the imagined desert wasteland could be a place where barely perceptible creatures will flourish. “This is a blank petri dish,” says Wilson. “Microbial life will survive and thrive after humans have made the Earth uninhabitable for the life forms we love.”
The blasted landscape memorialized in Wilson’s work offers an opening to think about the lifeforms that will flourish in the aftermath of apocalyptic disasters for humans. Wilson’s cratered wasteland offers us a vision of a future that, in his words, “is only a possibility.” While “the scales are tipping from the possible to the probable,” in Wilson’s mind, this future is conditional, not inevitable.
At the intersection of dread and hope, Wilson sees the potential of tiny actions to make the world a more livable place. Against the bleak backdrop of this possible future, where concrete hopes for life on Earth can be grounded only in tenacious microorganisms, he regards the historical present as a moment that is ripe with openended biocultural possibilities.
Further Reading
Kirksey, Eben et al. (2014) “Hope in Blasted Landscapes” in The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 47-50.
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