Nowhere else are the practices of field work and curatorial care more intimately related than in the context of the natural history museum. As suggested by biologist John G.T. Anderson (2013), natural history itself can be seen as a history of fieldwork, where expeditions, discoveries, meticulous observation, the formulation of hypotheses and the collection of specimens have been gathered “to organize stories into facts.” The natural history museum is the site where since modernity the products of fieldwork have been assembled for public display.

Anna-Sophie Springer will present her curatorial field research concerning the role of natural history collections in the Anthropocene. Departing from the question, what is the legacy of such collections of nature–culture when the division between nature and culture is radically overturned, she will discuss the slow environmental violence silently embodied in specimens’ collections ranging from those gathered in nineteenth century colonial explorations such as Alfred Russel Wallace’s Malay expedition in Southeast Asia to the so-called “species banks” currently being established in many parts of the world.

From 1854–62, Wallace travelled Kepulauan Nusantara (the Indonesian archipelago) documenting the region’s biodiversity and amassing a gigantic collection of specimens sold to European museums. He also carefully studied this array of dead animals in order to deduce the theory of evolution through natural selection, and the theory of biogeographical distribution. But while the Malay archipelago once provided the natural habitat for three quarters of all the world’s flora and fauna (explaining its popularity with European naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries), scientists now suggest that by the end of this century Southeast Asian rainforests will have disappeared by two thirds, with biodiversity being reduced by at least fifty percent. Today, the pinned insects and taxidermy birds, reptiles, mammals, and botanical herbaria gathered in the archipelago by figures such as Wallace thus also testify to the severe environmental transformations in process since the region’s colonial occupation. And while in the debates surrounding the Anthropocene thesis many contemporary scientists argue that over the last 500 years humans have become the most consequential evolutionary force in producing biological change (including on the genetic level), today it has also become possible to select and purchase species in less affected areas through professed “biodiversity shares.” But does the collection of these assets really bear the promise to sustainably protect those complex habitats or do they not rather constitute the next financial bubble, new sites of investment and ordering space through finance, which, borrowing the words of Emily Eliza Scott (2015), we would do well in finding ways to “colonize or conquer”?

After introducing the conceptual apparatus of her research, Springer will confront this question by discussing some of the curatorial strategies of her upcoming collaborative exhibition cycle, the 125,660 Specimens of Natural History project, premiering in Jakarta, Indonesia this August, as well as briefly talking about intercalations, the new book-as-exhibition series on Anthropocene issues she is co-editing and publishing for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

The lecture is moderated by Charles Stankievech, Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

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Anna-Sophie will also be present for a book launch for the series intercalations at Art Metropole (1490 Dundas St.W.) the night before, April 1^st, at 6pm. The event will include a conversation with Mitchell Akiyama one of the authors in the series. http://artmetropole.com

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ANNA-SOPHIE SPRINGER is a writer, editor, curator, and co-director (with Charles Stankievech) of K. Verlag, an independent Berlin-based publishing project exploring the book as a site for exhibition making. Her practice merges curatorial, editorial, and artistic interests by stimulating fluid relations among images, artifacts, and texts in order to produce new geographical, physical, and cognitive proximities, often in relation to historical archives. She has previously worked as Associate Editor of publications for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and as Editor for the pioneering German theory publisher Merve Verlag, before launching K. in 2011. Anna-Sophie is also a member of the HKW’s SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network where she co-edits the intercalations: paginated exhibition book series co-published by K. in the framework of the HKW’s “Anthropocene Project.” As a curator, her previous exhibitions include the touring group show Ha Ha Road (UK, 2011–12), on the subversive power of humor; The Subjective Object (GRASSI Ethnographic Museum Leipzig, 2012), on display practices and the archive; as well as the series EX LIBRIS (Galerie Wien Lukatsch, Berlin and other venues, 2013), exploring various libraries as curatorial spaces. Her forthcoming exhibition project 125,660 Specimens of Natural History (co-curated with Etienne Turpin) will open at Komunitas Salihara, in Jakarta, Indonesia, in August 2015. Her essays and interviews have been published including in C Magazine, Fillip, and Scapegoat. Her collection of interviews, TRAVERSALS: Conversations on Art and Writing, was released in September 2014; in January 2015 her exhibition-book Fantasies of the Library was released as the inaugural publication in the intercalations series. She is also the editor of The Subjective Object (Berlin & Leipzig, 2012) and co-editor of intercalations 2: Land & Animal & Nonanimal (Berlin, 2015). She received her M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and her M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig. In 2014 she was the Craig-Kade Visiting Scholar in Residence at Rutgers University, NJ