The initial inspiration for this project was the artwork of Joseph Beuys; I Like America and America Likes Me. The idea of a man trapping himself in a well-lit gallery space with a live coyote was fascinating, to say the least. In particular, I was interested in his fascination with materials and making art with mediums such as felt, animal fat, and animal fur, even going as far as cradling a dead hare. Furthermore, his alleged tale of encountering a Tatar tribe member in which the tribesmen took care of him, wrapping him in felt and animal parts to keep him alive. Though much of this is probably selfly mythologized. 

Of course, the mention of a Tatar, an old Turkic/Mongol ethnicity, instantly reminded me of my homeland, where such conceptual explorations in Beuys work are exhibited on a daily basis on the vast steppes. Subsequent research of ideas led me down a rabbit hole of abstract performance artists to anarchist philosophers, mutual aid, and life on the nomadic steppe in Central and northern Asia. This allowed me to curate a global and diverse art collection that varies greatly but still holds its weight in a robust thematic connection. In this visual novel/exhibit, I argue that the only move forward for humankind is co-dependent cohabitation with nature and move away from western capitalism. 

The entire exhibit will be thematically presented as a video game-based visual novel. The setting of which is a post-apocalyptic world in which humans must live in anarchist communes for survival, the host being a pixelated version of myself; you travel the ruins with this lonely museum curator and discover what led to humanity’s fall. By the end of the exhibit, the viewer will see the conclusion of the tour guide’s fate and ultimately take rain over as the museum’s new curator. This type of story and art focus is to instill a sense of immersion and depth to a research-heavy project.

The first exhibition looks at abstract and performance art as a means to explore human-nature mutual aid, visualized as symbiotic manifestations. The first being, I like America and America likes me, followed by Revital Cohen’s Life Support, a shockingly daring artist that combines the world of biology and art to daringly conceive of what literal human and animal symbiosis would look like. After is Miru Kim’s The Pig that therefore I am, an erotic and evocative artist that blurs the line between animal and human through her powerful photographs.

Following that is a historical and artistic interpretation of the ideas of Anarchist ideas. From the illustrations of Clifford Harper’s idealized anarchist visions to the Graphic Design of CNT-FAI during the anti-fascist anarchist collectives under the Francoist rule of Spain, where anarchism was a means of rebellion. After a modern look into mutual aid as a measure to combat refugees and covid in Greece’s hardest neighborhoods. A huge inspiration being the writings of Peter Kropotkin and other contemporaries. The example that stood out to me the most was the idea of an ecologically mindful and mutually aid-driven city in Elisee Reclus’ texts. The natural city as he puts it is a place where the urban border is an indefinite extension of the city’s natural counterparts. He envisioned urban faces to lack fences and divisions, where agriculture isn’t hidden from the city dweller but rather lives in it. Both writers’ ideas are integral to our modern conception of a welcoming home for wildlife in the urban space. Though not heavily featured as an artwork topic, one such idea is the Zoopolis, the notion of non-anthropocentric design, including elements of nature as a means for peaceful and non-intrusive coexistence, or at least to minimize it as much as possible. Ultimately, a conclusion is reached upon which the modern city can no longer function without a non-anthropocentric perspective to architecture, upon which people and nature will live in parallel.

As a close for the finale, I end the exhibit with a mix of anthropology and art by examining art inspired by the great Asian steppe and its indigenous inhabitants who persist today in a world full of western and Sinocentric colonialism. Though capitalist encroachments endanger their cultures, we exhibit what an ecologically sustainable and harmonious relationship between human spaces and natural animal spaces could look like. It is an alternative perspective to both the western capitalist domination. Such artists in the exhibit come in the form of Anu Osva, an artist painting Yakutian cattle in the barren icescape of Siberia, Baatarzorig Batjargal, a classically trained “Mongol Zurag” artist, blending religious, ancestral, and modern elements into his intricate paintings, and topped off with an object-based art project in which Hermoine Spriggs attempts to see the world through a Mongol Nomadic Herder’s lasso.