Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass)

The film and research project is an exploration in ecologies of extinction and collaborative survival in the Southern Russian steppes. The two concepts of extinction and becoming are difficult to think together, both are more than just a metaphor and none of them offer an easy way out. Tossing more species to the margins increasingly faster, extinction highlights the extraordinary level of disturbance and precarity that the bonding of science and capitalism has imposed on our and other species. Most creatures and places of the earth have been measured, consumed, exhausted, infected, eliminated, and otherwise killed. Becoming adds an affective dimension to our relation with the environment and helps to grasp the disappearance of species, not only as destructive and final, but as transitory.

Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) mobilizes our imagination for a future life without reconciliation or a place to hide. It embraces the struggle of a collective survival together with the nonhuman. To make this possible, we might need to establish an inclusive approach to ecological conservation and survival, where human reproduction is not the most important factor. We might begin by perceiving the world not as “our” environment, “our” climate, “our” epoch, “our” survival, “our” films, or “our” images. Attempting to do this, the project focuses on plant sensing; an archeological excavation of horses from the late Palaeolithic period; an ecological restoration project of grassland; and cyanobacteria. Assemblages of cyanobacteria sparked what is called the Great Oxygenation Event, dramatically changing the metabolism and composition of the planet by converting the more inhospitable gases in the young earth’s atmosphere into oxygen, making plant and animal life possible, but also leading to the extinction of oxygen-intolerant anaerobe organisms.