Red-Crested Pochard Print

With the ecological disaster on the way, Baudrillard’s and Bourriaud’s essays have led me to think of contemporary metropolises, especially those with a deep cultural footprint, as real, not seaworthy, arks. Civilization will end in collapsed buildings and muted artworks. No spiritual legacy will be relevant to the creatures surviving the disaster, which will unknowingly adapt to the new and possibly extreme conditions. The laws of nature do not comply with the arbitrary logic of endogenous economic variables. The profit & loss statement rests on a survival or death basis: a den is a den, a never disrupted connection to wilderness, without further property rights, not an income-generating real estate investment. To lay the foundations of a modern antediluvian book as a body of writings and (partially) illegible writing, the relationships in the society of animals and plants proliferating in a metropolitan environment must hence be explored and accounted for: flight paths of birds at an airport, group dynamics of pigeons, codes of tweeting titmice. Even the way grass grows in concrete cracks warrants a detailed study to trigger artistic response.