Book Club

Remember Nature: 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth

(Obrist, H.U. and Stasinopoulos, K., eds.; Penguin 2021)

Reviewer: Kyra Pollitt

James Bridle’s contribution to this volume (no. 58, ‘Back to Earth’) is perhaps the one that struck me most immediately. I found his artwork translated some of the difficult, abstract, scientific information about global climate change into something I could grasp, something almost tangible. Here’s an excerpt to see if it has the same effect on you:

According to researchers at the University of California, the global mean velocity of climate change is 0.42 km/yr, or about 1.15 metres per day (1). This is the distance plants and animals— including us —need to physically move polewards (or uphill) every day for our immediate environment to stay the same. This velocity will continue to increase.

Shockingly real, right?

The inspirational actor behind this intriguing, challenging, and stimulating collection is the brilliant and famed curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist. He and his colleagues at London’s Serpentine Gallery have taken inspiration from Édouard Glissant’s notion of mondialité— ‘a form of worldwide exchange that recognizes and preserves…the cultural complexity of the world in which we live’ —and they have been investigating what it might mean to make the gallery carbon neutral. Obrist asks:

…what is the ecological cost of shipping artworks for exhibitions? Can we explore what might be called sustainable curation and develop new standards and practices? One of many possibilities is to invite artists to write instructions, scores and recipes that can be interpreted by others each time they are presented.

And that’s the basis of this volume. The contributions make for a varied and fascinating exhibition-with-a-difference. It’s a whole new, sustainable way of engaging with art.

There is plenty here for every taste and sensibility, and I’m certain readers will each respond differently to each of the 140 artists’ contributions. I was particularly drawn to the vein of New Animism pulsing through many of the contributions. Crucially, though, this is a book that gives you plenty to do. Most of the artworks offer suggestions for actions that readers can take; as individuals, within communities, and on various scales— ‘an instruction, a DIY action, a recipe, a score, or an offering for the Earth’. I have already found myself posting my own instruction-artwork on my socials.

This is a volume that you can dip in to and out of at your own pace, allowing the ideas and proposals to percolate and ferment. My copy was gifted to me by a wise and wonderful person, and it feels like a wise and wonderful book; one that has already earned its prominent place— within easy reach —on my bookshelf. It’s certainly a book that I will be returning to again and again.

(1) Loarie, S.; Duffy, P.; Hamilton, H. et al., ‘TheVelocity of Climate Change’, in Nature 462(2009): 1052-5