On the occasion of the release of Justine Blau’s recent K. Verlag publication Veil of Nature—Processing Process (2024), the artist has conceived a transdisciplinary symposium in collaboration with the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Luxembourg. As the book explores the possible resurrection of an extinct plant from Charles Darwin’s herbarium, this one-day event convenes a diverse group of national and international speakers to reflect on conservation in times of crisis. Together, they will engage with questions of ecological breakdown, approaches to preservation, and the myriad ways in which the natural world matters and is perceived.
As co-editors of Veil of Nature, Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin are pleased to contribute to this symposium with a presentation titled “Curating and/or Symbiogenesis.” This contribution builds on their long-term work not only within the K. Verlag publishing atelier, but as Co-Principal Investigators of the exhibition-led inquiry Reassembling the Natural (RN). In their presentation, they look forward to revisiting and sharing a research trajectory that critically engages with the colonial, material, and epistemic infrastructures of natural history—its museums, its collections, its classificatory regimes, and racializing ways of seeing. If natural history museums once served to naturalize extractivism and ecocidal worldviews—dismembering multispecies worlds, converting kin into data, and transforming Indigenous territories into “natural” resources—RN asks how such institutions might now be reimagined. The initiative’s approach explores how the dismantling of dominant museological frameworks can open towards practices of ecological reparation and more-than-human care and affiliation. In this shared space of inquiry, curatorial work becomes an act of symbiogenesis: not simply a mode of displaying an image of nature, but a process of co-emergence and transformative relation.
VEIL OF NATURE — a symposium with contributions from:
Justine Blau, Guy Colling, Catherine Gautier, Pierre-Henri Gouyon, Thierry Helminger, Axel Hochkirch, Patrick Michaely, and Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin (Reassembling the Natural)
Practical information:
LUGA Lab, Parc Odendahl, Pfaffenthal, Luxembourg
Parking: Glacis Parking, Panoramic Elevator Pfaffenthal
Train: Stop Pfaffenthal-Kirchberg
Bus: Lines 23 and 26, Stop Pfaffenthal-Vauban