ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the major tenets of a temporary institution: Museum of Nonhumanity, launched by Laura Gustafsson and Terike Happoja in Helsinki. Subsequently, a research-based project, Falling Birds, a poetic experiment by Helena Hunter that materialises Natural History Museum specimens in the context of environmental change and species extinction, will be discussed. In this way, the chapter addresses the question of how artistic practices contribute to the revisions of knowledge production and support cross-disciplinary practice-based research that embraces relations to times, material, political territories, and our more-than-human entanglements. As I will indicate, the re(situation) of more-than-human knowledge in the practices enables us to acknowledge both the peripheries and the depths of our wordily entanglements with the intensive dynamics of the nonhuman world and thus negotiate inequalities that we all share. In this sense, the artistic process is seen as the reconfiguration of knowledge through material practices of engagement that require from us—in the idiom of Karen Barad—the employment of an ethico-onto-epistemological approach.
