Abstract
Elephant in the Room is a speculative ecofeminist fable for the climate crisis. The animation addresses the elephant in the room—the climate emergency—by telling the story of one elephant who takes action to combat environmental injustice and climate change.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York is home to the famous displays of taxidermy dioramas, which, in The Akeley Hall of African Mammals, includes a herd of eight elephants that were largely “made” by Carl Akeley, after whom the hall is named. One of these elephants was shot by President Theodore Roosevelt during the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition (1909–1910), in which thousands of animals were trapped and killed to become property of the museum. In her environmentalist rebellion, the herd’s African matriarch comes to life charging out of the American Museum of Natural History to stomach the systemic legacies of “the commerce of power and knowledge in white and male supremacist monopoly capitalism,” all outlined by Donna Haraway as the “Teddy Bear Patriarchy.”Footnote1 By taking her demands to the streets, the elephant underlines the role of museums in wider calls for climate justice, which necessary involve a critical revision of the museum’s own legacies, and their myriad entanglements with extractivist environmental histories in the ways that have constructed worlds (and worldviews) that perpetuated division, dispossession, and violence.
The story explores how rethinking the design, purpose, and experience of natural history museums can foster new forms of public pedagogy, in which curatorial practices become a magnifying glass for climate campaigns. Figuration, which bestows personhood onto the elephant, is here a crucial aesthetic method for this moment of crisis. Figures are ‘material-semiotic knots,’ as noted by Donna Haraway. They help us grapple inside the flesh of the world, making entanglements in which diverse clusters of meaning (narratives, discourses, precedents, imaginaries) shape one another through “creating performative images that can be inhabited.”Footnote2 The Elephant in the Room is one such animal fable in an architecture parlante’s clothing. The elephant makes explicit and explains its own function or identity: to affectively engage and generate care for matters and lifeforms that, otherwise, would be neglected or overlooked. It fuses climate purpose and artistic purpose into one (w)hole Trojan Elephant. Such a fable, which is apt to delight and entertain, always makes a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance. In this sense, the elephant as museum is less a curator—that which manages, administers, or organizes a collection—and more a caretaker, that is someone who takes care of a planet, and with responsibility for keeping a place in good repair. The need to craft such praxis of care and response, or response-ability to stay with the words of Haraway, implies both a design to find out more about an issue and an ethical obligation to become concerned and to act. This story comes at a time when we stand to imagine how we will answer the question of young climate activists: “you knew what you had to know, what did you do?” Academics stand in a special position to provoke, envision, and propose an institutional responsibility and action on the part of the university. Are we architecture educators able to consent to this trust, to accept giving it the power to affect us?
Notes
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rania Ghosn
Rania Ghosn is founding partner of Design Earth and associate professor of architecture and urbanism at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is founding editor of the journal New Geographies, editor of Landscapes of Energy (2010), and co-author of Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015) and Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2018; 2020).
El Hadi Jazairy
El Hadi Jazairy is founding partner of Design Earth and associate professor of architecture at University of Michigan Taubman College. He is founding editor of the journal New Geographies, editor of Scales of the Earth (2011), and co-author of Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015) and Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2018; 2020).
Notes
1 Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Evil,” Social Text no. 11 (Winter 1984–1985): 20–64.
2 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM. Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997).