Assemblages

Everywhere among us, there are assemblages of species at work. We may not notice their labor, but we will notice when they are gone. By eradicating them we are eliminating our companions who sustain us, the assemblages to which we, too, belong. The coot, the hoverfly, the cattail, the clover, the thistle, and the horsetail. We don’t know which species, which individuals, will be laid down in the fossil record of our deep future. But we can imagine the elegies to be written for them. We can imagine oral histories from the more-than-human world that bear witness to this turning point in the Anthropocene. It is more than an impulse to collect. The plants contorted into the space of an herbarium will mean nothing when there is no archive to hold them. Flattened into inscriptions in rock, their forms will be as unintelligible as our own human languages. Instead it is an attempt to listen, face-to-face with the inevitable loss ahead.

concept by Nóra Békés & Mark S. Mullee
texts by Mark S. Mullee
illustrations & exhibition design by Nóra Békés
made in 2022
presented in Growing Space Wielewaal, Rotterdam
photos by Amanda Mullee