Eremocene (2021)

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In 1996, two administrators of a convalescent centre in the US state of Georgia wrote to Nature journal proposing that a name was needed for an individual that is the last of its kind. Nature invited suggestions from their readers. … 

 

“Among the suggestions were ‘terminarch,’ ‘ender,’ ‘relict,’ ‘yatim,’ and ‘lastline,’ but the new word that stuck was ‘endling.’ Of all the proposed names, it is the most diminutive (like duckling or “fingerling”) and perhaps the most storied (like ‘End Times’). The little sound of it jingles like a newborn rattle, which makes it doubly sad.’

                                                                                   

                 Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2018)

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‘Frequently juxtaposed against reason, feelings and emotions are still conflated with irrational thought, instinct, and uncritical belief ... Yet feelings often serve as the unspoken ground for changing or challenging inherited structures of thought, meaning, and action. As the poet E. E. Cummings once asked, “since feeling is first / who pays attention / to the syntax of things”?

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Animals, too, occupy a peculiar space of intimacy and otherness that is hard to think straight about.’

 

From Transformed by Ghosts - Toward Futures of Less Loss by Brianne Donaldson, the Introduction to Feeling Animal Death - Being Host to Ghosts, Edited by Brianne Donaldson and Ashley King (2019)                                                                     

Not everyone gets marble. Some lives—and some deaths—are given more weight than others. We know this to be true of the human realm and much has been said about the injustice that underlies it. Across all beings, it is particularly so that some lives are valued more than others, and much less is said about that. Our routine acceptance of the deaths of ‘nonhumans’ – in unimaginable numbers and by violent means - is incomprehensible when you consider that most humans are empathic, and also squeamish about the spilling of blood. Yet, it remains a rare and specialised enterprise to think about those deaths, and most of us don’t. Or can’t. We’re somehow inured. I’m endlessly curious about how my species maintains that emotional separation. And when it comes to the finality of a species’ extinction, do we even begin to understand or feel the loss? We keep count of the numbers lost, but where is the grieving?      

                                                                                   Bonita Alice

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*Eremocene means, an Age of Loneliness, a name American biologist, E.O.Wilson, has proposed for the coming time, when humans have destroyed most other life forms on Earth.

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EREMOCENE WAS SHOWN IN 2021 AT EVERARD READ CAPE TOWN ON THEIR AUGUST CUBICLES EXHIBITION