Dehlia Hannah: Rewilding the Museum

Museums are anything but wild. Historically, museums have functioned as key sites for the production of boundaries between nature and culture. Nature might be presented in form and image, but its processes must not be allowed to take hold within museum architecture. In a warming world, climate-controlled interiors are increasingly vulnerable to floods, fires, and power failures. In an effort to address environmental crises, artists chop through walls, fill them with dirt, and bring in insects, plants, and animals, while others leave the institution altogether to embrace the specificity of site. Audiences are drawn outside and off-screen, into zones that recalibrate norms of aesthetic attention. Rewilding the Museum explores a paradox that also lurks at the heart of restoration ecology: We cannot return to past fantasies of “nature.” Rather, we must foster ecologies that support biodiversity and stable geophysical cycles. This book asks how artists and curators are working with and against exhibition infrastructures to elaborate contemporary ideas of nature.