we are all chimeras → Research-based curatorial programme exploring sound, ecology and post-human perspectives.

2024

we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids is a research-led curatorial project developed as part of the post-graduate diploma in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. The programme brought together artists and researchers working across sound, ecology and technology, creating a platform for interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration.

Through a series of events and curatorial interventions, the project explored embodied and collective approaches to knowledge production, questioning dominant anthropocentric frameworks and proposing more relational ways of engaging with the environment. As part of the programme we have collaborated with artists: Laura Selby, Agnieszka Polska and Yuri Tuma. Listening workshops were possible to take place thanks to the partnerships with the OmVed Gardens in London and the Institute for the Postnatural Studies.

What happens when we quiet down and leave room for other species to be heard?
What does it mean to listen to something you cannot understand?
Like in Killers of the Flower Moon, how does it feel when the subtitles are removed?

Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. What happens when human-made noise drowns out all other sound? Over the past century, humans have used technology to monopolise and capture the Earth's soundscape. Leveraging technology, artists and scientists have captured the vibrational essence of life forms and ecosystems, often creating sonic landscapes that reveal the complexity of multispecies dynamics, making audible the often silent or unnoticed communications happening around us. Are these merely extractive gestures, enabling us to possess and manipulate sonic information from the natural world, or can technologies of amplification and recording enable the decentralisation of the human through deep listening practices?

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway uses the concept of the cyborg as a metaphor for the blurring of boundaries between nature and culture. Traditionally seen as separate domains: nature as the realm of the organic and inherent, and culture as the realm of human-made–constructed realities here are contested. By existing simultaneously as a product of natural processes and technological advancements, the cyborg shows how these realms are not mutually exclusive but are interconnected and co-constitutive. We take the name of this project from Haraway’s assertion that "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs." This curatorial project builds on Haraway’s challenge to traditional notions of identity through new ways of understanding our interconnectedness with technology and nature.

Drawing on Pauline Oliveros' “Deep Listening” practice, artist Laura Selby led a workshop at OmVed Gardens, where participants engaged in sonic contamination exercises. Each participant chose a listening location and collected a soil sample to form a chromatographic trace, displaying the unseen micro-worlds for each ‘time species’ [chosen listening location]. Working with the material from the workshop Selby produced an interactive installation co-created by humans, more-than-humans, and AI.

Through the screening of The Book of Flowers, a film made by Agnieszka Polska working in collaboration with AI, the audience is reminded of another often forgotten technology of humanity, the technology of storytelling. Here we are invited into a daydreaming, a world-building of alternative narratives about symbiotic relationships with what we consider an external part of ourselves - nature. We are all Chimeras concludes with an online seminar by Yuri Tuma, the co-founder of the Institute of Postnatural Studies, where participants will be invited to question their relationship with nature through sound ecologies.

Investigating the curatorial role in defining future narratives, [We are all chimeras] is framed as a dynamic research laboratory. Understanding the curatorial as an event of knowledge creation, drawing on the writing of Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdóttir, our programme engages in alternative practices of knowledge creation through diverse methodologies. 'We are all chimeras' invites the audience to not only imagine alternative narratives of humans' relationship with nature and technology, but also to actively shape them through a combination of interactive, embodied, and participatory methodologies. Working with interdisciplinary practitioners who situate their work between the fields of art and science we engage in blurring the lines between culture and nature, emphasising the interdependence of our ecological existence.

Artists:
Laura Selby, Agnieszka Polska, Yuri Tuma

Curators:
Tamara Manova, Zosia Kierkuś,
Chingwai Yuen, Neal Yang,
Xiaohan Pu, He Jie

Laura Selby’s collaborators:
Videography and Film: Sunghoon Song
Interaction Visual Design: Bryan Yueshen Wu

Agnieszka Polska’s collaborators:
Tina Greatrex, Nathan Gray, Ewa Polska,
Igor Kłaczyński, The Sound Company

The Book of Flowers, HD video, 9 min. 35 sec., 2023, courtesy the artist and Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, Warsaw

Graphic Design:
Tamara Manova
Zosia Kierkuś

Partners:
Institute for Postnatural Studies
OmVed Gardens