Every Single Thing...

Every Single Thing That Exists in This Infinite Universe Is Either… 'Opposing Anthropocentrism (…) means seeing how we humans are included in the biosphere as one being among others.' Timothy Morton In our daily hustle, we often overlook our reliance on the environment. Enclosed within the human-made places, we forget the bonds with the land. Since the agrarian revolutions, humanity has gradually gained a sense of dominance over the ecosystem, abstracting itself from the equation of life of the natural systems, relegating the environment to mere background noise. The trajectory of modern societies has built walls—both physical and conceptual—that keep the human-environment entanglement out of sight and out of mind. At the same time, our exploitative relationship with the land and its inhabitants has reached various thresholds of environmental resilience, resulting in unprecedented degradation. This exposes not only the fragility of ecosystems but also our own vulnerability. Moreover, the tendency to organise the world into binary ‘either… or’ categories prevents us from embracing the diverse viewpoints and roles humans hold within the ecosystem. In the midst of the unfolding eco-social crisis, many of us are thus looking into alternative modes of self-organisation that would recognise interconnectivity and interdependencies humans form with and within the global ecosystems, emphasising a perspective of care. Nonetheless, adopting a more fluid, non-hierarchical view of our relationship with other-than-humans, though potentially transformative, is challenging in practice. Assigning equal value to All turns this idea into an abstract concept that is difficult to grasp. How can we disrupt the standard modes of understanding our relationships with the other earthly entities in a way we can rationally accept? A need emerges for stories that will allow us to reform our ecologies—stories rooted in reciprocity rather than productivity. They not only celebrate the other-than-human world but also place humans among the others, together forming what has been dubbed bio-cultural diversity. The exhibition ‘Every Single Thing That Exists in This Infinite Universe Is Either…’ forms a multi-layered narrative, offering the audience various points of entry into the realm of human and other-than-human interactions. It presents life as an entanglement of possibilities and unexpected perspectives. As ecofeminism scholar Donna Haraway wrote, ‘In layers of history, layers of biology, layers of naturecultures, complexity is the name of our game’, underscoring the intrinsic bonds between humans and all their earthly kin—plants, microorganisms, viruses, fungi, and future bioforms. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the exhibition reveals a multi-faceted reality of relations, moving beyond the dualistic divides. It adopts a position of looking inward, outwards, and around to create the subjectivity of the environment. There are no clear boundaries between entities and systems, whether physical or virtual, nor between the past and the future. Humans become part of the variety and singularity of the biosphere.