04/09/2020
Artist Jonas Staal writes about Not An Alternative's climate propagandas in E-Flux:
"Such endeavors to imagine more-than-human ecologies of comradeship are part of what the collective of artists, academics, and Indigenous activists Not An Alternative refer to as the specter of “primitive communism.” The collective writes that primitive communism names a “collective mode of life that neither capitalism nor settler colonialism could fully manage, contain, or eradicate.” This specter could not be more fundamentally opposed to the specter of eco-fascism I started with. Not An Alternative’s battleground is the natural history museum, which has historically perpetuated the idea of a passive nature external to humans, which is simultaneously contemplated upon and extracted from. In radical contrast to this is the indigenous idea of the natural world as articulated by Not An Alternative, building on the work of indigenous academic Nick Estes, who is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe: here nature is “inalienable,” and rivers and forests are “nonhuman relatives” that cannot be commodified. They continue: “The specter, as an absence that insists from within the capitalist world, connects living communists to their ancestors—the primitive communists of pre-capitalist times—and their descendants, those who have yet to take up the cause.”
Not An Alternative’s climate propaganda manifests in their ongoing organizational artwork of institutional liberation titled The Natural History Museum (2014–ongoing). As part of this project, in 2015 they displayed a series of dioramas at the annual convention of the American Alliance of Museums—an organization of which they managed to strategically become a member. These dioramas illustrated what they called our “fossil fuel ecosystem,” highlighting in particular the impact of corporations owned by David H. Koch, the sponsor of the exhibition. Behind glass, a stuffed polar bear was surrounded by broken TV sets and car tires. This is nature in the racial Capitalocene: a combination of wretched earth, toxins, and nonhuman comrades struggling for survival in an altered ecosystem. But the work of the collective does not limit itself to these necessary forms of institutional critique. Their project Whale People: Protectors of the Sea (2018) concerned the endangered orca, known in the language of the Indigenous Lummi Nation as “Qw’e lh’ol mechen” (our people that live under the sea). This project involved bringing a whale totem, created by Lummi Nation carvers Jewell James and the House of Tears Carvers, into the Florida Museum of Natural History. The totem had already traveled to various sites of environmental struggle across the country. Turning the exhibition space into a site of collective ritual, elders of the Lummi nation guided visitors in laying hands on the totem, collectively evoking the specter of a radically different natural history. This specter makes visible an opening (which Not An Alternative refers to as “the gap”) that has not been foreclosed by the racial Capitalocene, one that leads towards the possibility of a “dialectical struggle between extinction and resurrection.”
From a more-than-human cosmopolitics to the Terrestrial, from our toxic commons to the specter of primitive communism—these forms of climate propaganda envision a radically different ecology where human, nonhuman, and other-than-human comradeship enables not merely survival, but transformation."
If any illusions remain that only humans have world-making agency in our ecosystem, the consequences of the racial Capitalocene are forcing these to a…
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