Museum as Hologenome

Our project seeks to facilitate the creation of another perception of our world as symbiotic and interdependent, by challenging the hierarchical categorisation between species (humans vs non-humans), deeply modifying our self-centered role as individuals from an extractive and abusive one, to one that’s humbly supportive.

Drawing from the rhizome, as explained by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and from Lynn Margulis’ elaboration of the holobiont, the museum is not a source of stabilization of a meaning and rigid interpretation, but a participant in the process of reorienting ourselves towards the planet and its future. Museums’ locations are ravaged: former mining sites, agricultural monocultures, seas that were overfished. If museums are “the cultural conscience of the nations”, they should function as spaces beyond the reductionist view of the nations/human, creating a more holistic, co-evolutionary realm, where the site is the protagonist.

The museum is co-administered by the agents inhabiting it, and its visitors learn interspecies humility and interdependency. The relationships and knowledge they create serve the common planetary survival.

The concept can be adapted and developed, like a toolkit, for various sites, with respect to their particular realities, ecosystems, and communities. We’d like to think of it as a light, replicable infrastructure, allowing zooming into the deep ecologies of our surroundings, contemplation, and of “making kin” with other beings, living and not-living.

Project Team

Natalia Skoczylas, Francesca Ercoli, Jakob Błażejczak

Project Name

Museum as Hologenome

Team Location

Berlin, Germany

Category

Community, activism and engagement