Recognised as archives documenting natural research and human impact on nature and biodiversity loss, natural history museums prompt questions about how to explore, interpret and put their collections in context so as to provoke a discussion on the consequences of constructed concepts of nature, pressing ecological issues, and ethical obligations towards nonhuman beings and the next generation. Answers to these questions may be found in the analysis of selected works by Mark Dion who uses museum instruments and collections not so much to criticise the museum itself but to transform it into an agora. The author studies the artist’s works that refer to cabinets of curiosities. She argues that Dion’s Wunderkammer are visual quotations derived from their 16th and 17th century prototypes. Put in a new context, the quotations eliminate boundaries between words and images, theory and practice, art and science, nature and culture. The said quotations of cabinets of curiosities are of preposterous nature. Dion’s ‘mobile dioramas’ and his Ursus Maritimus project (1992–2002) are in turn recognised as subversive works where natural history museum instruments are used to unveil the institutional framework responsible for our seeing of nature and problems of the Anthropocene such as biodiversity loss.
The article is an analysis of selected autobiographical accounts of the first inhabitants of post-war Wrocław from 1945–1946 with regard to phonic descriptions contained in them. The analysis reveals several problems that a researcher reconstructing the city audiosphere on the basis of such texts must face, e.g. scarcity of descriptions of the city sounds, especially in memoirs, the fact that the authors limited themselves to noting down the sounds they heard without characterising them. Any future diary and memoir based research into the audiosphere of cities should aim at the identification of typical situations, the descriptions of which include sounds. This will make it possible to indicate factors that encourage people to listen to sounds and provide their extensive descriptions. Studies into the reconstruction of the city audiosphere must take into account all locations the sounds of which were noted down. A comparison of various texts in this respect may be helpful in creating a map of the city audiosphere as received by its residents, indicating significant similarities in the reception of the soundscape of urban space.
Taking up the problem of climate change, Nicholas Mirzoef, in his book How to See the World, argued that we should make it less abstract and that we need a new mode of visual thinking, adequate to the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene can also be heard and the anthropogenic impacts can have an audible dimension as well. This article provides reasons for using sounds as a medium communicating the ongoing changes and lays out different kinds of sound representations of the anthropocene demonstrated by practitioners and theoreticians of acoustic ecology and sound artists (B. Krause, D. Dunn). Recordings of the environment and works by sound artists are given consideration with respect to their affective potential, their ability to influence us and our emotions, to shape a more responsible attitude to the environment that we inhabit together with the nonhuman agents.
Things brought by missionaries from mission countries were a testimony of cultural and civilizational differences, objects of scientific research, goods enabling acquisition of funds and new patrons. They were classified and valued according to new rules. They were to bear witness to the success of missions and encourage their continuation. The Missionary Exhibition held in Vatican in 1925 perfectly illustrates the scale of the missionary project of acquiring ethnographic objects. This paper presents the importance of foreign things and their agency in legitimizing missions.
Fear is related to our cultural measures and imaginations. We experience it while the reserves of social imaginarium don’t offer us any tools to explain what is already happening and what might happen to us. I am analyzing Orchestrer la Perte by Simone Laroche and David Szanto and Lost Drones by The Fortunists, artistic works, which juxtapose technology with the human subject and nature. The authors refer to rather traditional concepts of the subject and nature, which still tend to influence our attitudes. The challenge brought to them by new technologies implies a loss of significant categories organizing the world, which guarantee a sense of safety, and a threat to essential values.
Collecting natural exhibits involves inflicting death and suffering on animals, which tends to be justified by benefi ts of scientific research. In any case, scientific considerations are not always the primary motive behind creating natural collections. The horror related to collecting natural exhibits is well shown by Arkady Fiedler in his books. His experiences make us aware of the ethical issues involved in the creation of natural collections, they make B. Klug’s question of whether we can notice the moral issue behind animals highly relevant in the context of such collections.
This article is concerned with the importance for urban studies of the role of the sonic environment in making the dwelling space familiar, developing a sense of belonging and building a community. We analyze three selected interviews with Wroclaw residents conducted within a project on the audiosphere and the soundscape of Wroclaw. The analysis attempts at determining what sounds our respondents described as specific for their place of residence, and what emotions, meanings and values were connected with this soundscape. Our study reveals an active role played by acoustic phenomena in the process of domesticating. R.M. Schafer’s conception of soundscape and B. Latour’s actor-network theory are the theoretical background for our analysis.