The « Hunting and Nature » museum denaturalized (abstract)

Remaking the Museum: Curation, Conservation, and Care in Times of Ecological Upheaval. Moesgaard Museum, December 6th and 7th, 2017 (Aarhus University, Centre for Environmental Humanities and AURA - Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) Abstract Joshua de Paiva (co-curator of the exhibition Animating landscapes. Following the tracks, jun.-sept. 2017) and Anne de Malleray, director of Billebaude, a publication of the Hunting and Nature Museum, and co-curator of Animating landscapes. Following the tracks. The « Hunting and Nature » museum denaturalized On the museum institution being exposed to an « ecological discourse », and the role of contemporary art in thinking new critical and relational ecologies A case study : the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, located in Paris, offers particularly interesting examples of experimental undertakings in re-making, or rather de-making and deconstructing the museum and the exhibition genre as a « mediating interface of modernity1 ». More importantly, those specific undertakings, engaging with complex realities and facing the museum’s internal contradictions — namely, the development of an ecological discourse in a museum dedicated to hunting and nature — under the initiative and spirit of its director, Claude d’Anthenaise, pave the way towards renewed experiences of being-within-the-world, and might help us rethink new aesthetic and relational ecologies. When entering this museum, located in a 17th « hôtel particulier » in le Marais, one is thrust into an inextricable entanglement of representations, imaginaries and narratives. We will first explore how the (apparent) contradiction between presenting the history of tracking and hunting and endorsing ecological issues is precisely what makes this place unique. Intricate discourses and realities may re-emerge from the blurring of boundaries between different ontologies, institutional historical frameworks, disciplines and regimes of exhibition and attention. Those superpositions and junctions, by putting at risk such distinctions as nature / culture or subject / object, seem to create a stage for enabling a renewed æsthetic experience of ecological relations — questioning art theory, æsthetics and ecological discourses themselves. How this shift occurred, practically, in the history of the museum, especially through the growing role given to contemporary art (since its reopening in 2007, with a new and original scenography)? Hybridity, humour, irony and traps to the visitor (whose role needs reformulation) are the core ingredients of this complexification of the modes of collecting, classifying and presenting works to the public. The troubled and uncanny associations, often magnified by an artistcurator coalition, are critical to the emergence of a museum facing its own inconsistencies, and the very sign of its vitality. The museum, and the contemporary artworks, become indeed not mere transmitters or relays of a preexisting and external committed ecological discourse, but the very place and material 1 Following Vincent Normand’s expression and analyses in « Theater, Garden, Bestiary », a conversation between Vincent Normand, Tristan Garcia and Filipa Ramos, in Mousse 55, p.167. to elaborate cross-disciplinary open discourses, taking on with the complexities of the present world, and partaking in the construction of new ways of inhabiting it, shifting our representations and uses of the formerly so-called « nature ». While the museum institution is being jeopardized by the ecological crisis context, it seems relevant, in this case, to also explore how the ecological discourse itself might be questioned by some of the museum’s undertakings. A specific attention will be cast upon the latest summer exhibition - Animating landscapes. Following the tracks (jun.sept. 2017), co-curated by Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati. Selected bibliography : - DONNA HARAWAY, Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene, 2016, Duke University Press - DONNA HARAWAY, « Teddy Bear Patriarchy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908– 1936 », Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routledge, London, 1989. - ANNA TSING, The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015 - VINCENT NORMAND in « Theater, Garden, Bestiary », a conversation between Vincent Normand, Tristan Garcia and Filipa Ramos, Mousse 55, 2016 - FIONA R. CAMERON, « Theorizing more-than-human collectives for climate change action in museums », in Ecologising museums, ed. Nick Aikens et al., L’internationale online, 2016. - BRUNO LATOUR, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. 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Xavier Douroux et Estelle Zhong Mengual, Les Presses du Réel, 2017 - CLAUDE D’ANTHENAISE, Le Cabinet de Diane au Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2007. - ÉTIENNE TURPIN, « Necroaesthetics: Denaturalising the Collection », in Ecologising Museums, ed. Nick Aikens et al., L’internationale online, 2016. - VINCENT NORMAND, « The Eclipse of the Witness: Natural Anatomy and the Scopic Regime of Modern Exhibition-Machines », in Ecologising Museums, ed. Nick Aikens et al., L’internationale online, 2016. - TIMOTHY MORTON, Ecology Without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 2007. - BILLEBAUDE, Sur la piste animale, june 2017