intercalations: paginated exhibition

The intercalations: paginated exhibition series is an experimental foray exploring the structure of the book as a potential curatorial space. As the reader-as-exhibition-viewer moves through these books-as-exhibition, she discovers that the erratic intercalations of the Anthropocene invite new forms of literacy, visuality, inquiry, and speculation that are, in the words of Clarice Lispector, less promiscuous than they are kaleidoscopic.

This six-part series was developed by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin for the Berlin Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s The 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 (2024), 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.

In 2016, intercalations 1 — Fantasies of the Library was republished as a stand-alone hardcover edition by The MIT Press. This edition is also still available worldwide in paperback. Any other volume, if sold out in print, can be enjoyed in digital form via the links below. 

Go to our News & Events to see where some of the pieces originally created for intercalations have traveled to later on. 

The intercalations: paginated exhibition series was edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin and designed in collaboration with Katharina Tauer. It is co-published with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin and was made possible by the Schering Stiftung.