Scatter. Enclosure
orThe Herd Comes Down to Dream, 2022-ongoing
Writing, doctored natural history images, archival research
The first text from this project was published in "Making Kin" in 2022 (Cthulhu Books, editorial platform for the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid): https://cthulhubooks.com/Making-Kin and a continuation of the research was enabled by the Delfina Foundation, London, in Winter 2023.
PDF available upon request
How might a threatened herd experience its diminishment? How different are the herds and how might its umwelt change as it is reintroduced? What is the ghostly imprint of the herd in the environment? How might herd memory, criss-crossed by the turbulence of relocation and environmental changes, be conceived, and what might that tell us about the complexities of ecologies and ecological loss? What might be some anthropocentric projections onto these timelines and loss lines?
In this unfurling work that combines writing and archival research, I consider a collective herd and ecological memory that dies, resurges, and transforms with the disappearance and reappearance of the Milu, a once extirpated deer. Embodiment – what the animal is and what it experiences, remembers, transmits – is explored through questions of transformation, memory (genetic and ecological), grief, and death, against a backdrop of political movements – land reforms in the UK and the Boxer’s Rebellion in China across the 19th-21st centuries.
Touted as an exemplary case study of the revival of a species from extirpation (extinction within its native habitats) in China, not in the least because of the latter’s reputation of ecological devastations, the Milu deer presents a way to examine notions of bounded origins, translations, (re)wildings, changing discourses around conservation and natural heritage, the politics of climate disaster, interspecies relations, while also becoming an opportunity to reflect on the landscapes of origin and transplantation. Its last herd in the wild is speculated to be either a captive herd on the grounds of the Palace (the apocrypha is that the last were eaten by starving peasants during the Boxer’s Rebellion) or a herd on Hainan island.
Due to European missionary expeditions and curiosity toward the captive herd, the deer was brought to Europe where a subsequent breeding programme at Woburn Abbey by the 11th Duke of Bedford, then president of the Zoological Society of London (and the Cremation Society of Great Britain) enabled its re-introduction into China, where it lives mostly in herds on reserves.
orThe Herd Comes Down to Dream, 2022-ongoing
Writing, doctored natural history images, archival research
The first text from this project was published in "Making Kin" in 2022 (Cthulhu Books, editorial platform for the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid): https://cthulhubooks.com/Making-Kin and a continuation of the research was enabled by the Delfina Foundation, London, in Winter 2023.
PDF available upon request
How might a threatened herd experience its diminishment? How different are the herds and how might its umwelt change as it is reintroduced? What is the ghostly imprint of the herd in the environment? How might herd memory, criss-crossed by the turbulence of relocation and environmental changes, be conceived, and what might that tell us about the complexities of ecologies and ecological loss? What might be some anthropocentric projections onto these timelines and loss lines?
In this unfurling work that combines writing and archival research, I consider a collective herd and ecological memory that dies, resurges, and transforms with the disappearance and reappearance of the Milu, a once extirpated deer. Embodiment – what the animal is and what it experiences, remembers, transmits – is explored through questions of transformation, memory (genetic and ecological), grief, and death, against a backdrop of political movements – land reforms in the UK and the Boxer’s Rebellion in China across the 19th-21st centuries.
Touted as an exemplary case study of the revival of a species from extirpation (extinction within its native habitats) in China, not in the least because of the latter’s reputation of ecological devastations, the Milu deer presents a way to examine notions of bounded origins, translations, (re)wildings, changing discourses around conservation and natural heritage, the politics of climate disaster, interspecies relations, while also becoming an opportunity to reflect on the landscapes of origin and transplantation. Its last herd in the wild is speculated to be either a captive herd on the grounds of the Palace (the apocrypha is that the last were eaten by starving peasants during the Boxer’s Rebellion) or a herd on Hainan island.
Due to European missionary expeditions and curiosity toward the captive herd, the deer was brought to Europe where a subsequent breeding programme at Woburn Abbey by the 11th Duke of Bedford, then president of the Zoological Society of London (and the Cremation Society of Great Britain) enabled its re-introduction into China, where it lives mostly in herds on reserves.