intercalations: paginated exhibition

This six-part series was developed by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin for the Berlin Haus der Kulturen der Welt's Anthropocene Project as a commission of the HKW's Synapse Curators' Network. It provokes questions about the validity of seeming categorical binaries such as culture and nature, human and non-human, subject and object, book and exhibition. The first volume, Fantasies of the Library (2015), inaugurates the series by investigating the book as space, scaffold, and medium for various ecologies of thought. The second volume, Land & Animal & Nonanimal (2015), focuses on the postnatural landscapes and specimens of the Earth; Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago (2017), the third volume, examines the mobility of colonial collections and the environmental transformations they co-produced, elaborating on the world of British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and his explorations of the Southeast Asian Malay archipelago in the mid-nineteenth century. Volume four, The Word for World Is Still Forest (2017), explores the forest as a set of confounding references of the Anthropocene, while the fifth volume, Decapitated Economies (2023), questions the “head” and its underestimation of the sophistication of corporeal desire when such intensities are released in accordance with the principles of a general economy. The final volume of the series, These Birds of Temptation (2021), is conceived as a refrain, populated with both acoustical lines of flight and the sorrows of captivity, in order to consider the minor science of ornithology and its various organizational logics. Together, these six volumes are published as printed matter paperback books, as well as web-based, open-access publications, leading their reader-as-exhibition viewers along a series of bifurcating trajectories where curators, artists, scientists, activists, storytellers, and writers pose urgent questions about contemporary struggles for both the cultivation, preservation, and reformation of biomes and their organisms, for land rights and territorial negotiations, and for possible new social, political, and more-than-human life forms.