Biologists suggest we are now entering Earth’s sixth mass extinction event. With increasing heat, pollution and toxicity putting pressure unevenly on all forms of life, how might we take up Donna Haraway’s call “to live and die well with each other in a thick present”? What are the politics, poetics and affects of more-than-human finitude? In 2018/19, Australian artist Tessa Zettel hosted a regular extinction study group at Institute for Provocation, Beijing, as a way to think together with local participants on these questions. Meetings and field trips were recorded and collected as a mini cassette library of extinction-related readings, spanning such territory as fossil nihilism, passenger pigeons, database aesthetics, de-extinction and cosmoecologies.

“Extinction Club Reading Group” sits within a longer-term project by the artist to make a handmade, speculative encyclopedia about extinctions in China. In text, drawing and sound, “The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: An Incomplete Inventory of Extinctions in the People’s Republic of China” attends to a variety of nonhumans (animals, birds, gastropods), languages and ways of living facing permanent erasure. Curious tales of past and impending loss weave through China’s rapidly transforming landscape, from the 80-million year-old pangolin to the functionally extinct baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) or Yangtze river dolphin (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis) which is on the brink of extinction, and the once locally-extinct Père David’s deer frolicking in Beijing’s Nanhaizi Park. Borrowing its title and categories from the fictional Chinese encyclopedia in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952), this unfinished book is a kind of delirious ficto-critical compendium describing how different beings, ecologies and histories are entangled in webs both material and ethical, borne across time and space by the dynamics of colonization, extraction and exchange. The publication will contain its own cassette tape with works by sound artists responding to local figures of extinction, including (so far) the dǎkǒu or cut-out CD and the prehistoric Chinese paddlefish.

This exhibit shows the cassette tape library and associated paraphernalia from artwork of “Extinction Club Reading Group, Beijing Chapter” (2018 – 19), wooden tiger’s head and binoculars from artwork of “Those that from a distance look like flies” (2019) and ink on paper, sound, text and archive materials from artwork of “The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: An Incomplete Inventory of Extinctions in the People’s Republic of China” (2018 – ongoing).

Courtesy of the artist