The Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species

Jozef Wouters is a very sincere and earnest young scenographer who communicates by creating huge but sturdy constructions in places you really wouldn’t expect to find them and plays with the dividing line between fiction and reality, stage and spectator.

His main purpose, as he explained during a talk two days ago at the opening of his latest work, is to look at how one can use structures to reveal underlying desires through spaces imprinted with a clear desire. The Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species is one of those structures, set up as exhibition and research space, a ‘new wing’ in the leafy grounds of the Natural History Museum in Brussels.

It is a remarkable piece of work: imaginative and bold, appealing to our own creative responses, uncompromising and playful, cleverly manipulating our position as what Augusto Boal would have referred to as ‘spect-actors’. During the day one can visit the ‘collection’, in the evenings there is a performance which proves to be a confrontational but rewarding experience for anyone who wants to understand more about themselves and their membership of that most exclusive of clubs: the human race.

Wouters and his collaborators, Menno and Michiel Vandevelde, research their projects in rigorous detail and the works have become increasingly adept at revealing complexity, layer after layer of meaning, creating tensions between present reality and the potential, the desire, for human intervention.

Each project is a continuation of one aspect broached in a previous one, so that this installation / performance for the KFDA was inspired by All Problems Can Never Be Solved for the KVS, 2012. For that project, they set up a fictitious architects’ agency and produced models of housing estates and tower blocks: small-scale models, but, nonetheless, structures functioning as carriers of desire.

In this case, the models revealed the desire to solve social problems in urban spaces. During the performance / installation, the fictitious architects’ agency presented the models in an appropriate urban environment as proposals for discussion with audiences and local inhabitants.

The latest project once again creates a fictitious institution and takes the concept and the exploration of problem-solving to another dimension. One of the 9 ‘guidelines’ presented to the audience for The Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species makes the uncompromising statement that:

"when confronted with a problem, the Institute calls it a problem, rejecting euphemisms like 'challenge' and 'opportunity'. The Institute does not necessarily believe there is a solution for every problem facing mankind."

Yet, the equally uncompromising guideline no. 8 is drawn from one of the last statements made by the late British historian and left-wing intellectual Tony Judt, author of Ill Fares the Land, shortly before his death in 2010: "We should be angrier than we are."

This latest work, the Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species, brings the conceptual, spatial and structural elements of their previous work together in an encounter with ourselves: Homo sapiens sapiens, the species that has dominated the planet with its desire for space since the first man walked out of Africa somewhere between 195,000 and 60,000 years ago. This, according to the ‘curator’ of the exhibition/installation (Wouters), is the moment when the natural harmony of eco-systems was first compromised.

Wouters and his collaborators have curated an exhibition containing 36 items, each of which represents a significant moment in human history. These include the domestication of the pig about 8,000 years ago and a replica of Ted Kaczynski’s hut (the American who sent bombs to scientists and politicians because he was enraged by a road built through the wilderness near his isolated log cabin).

The eruption of the Mount Pele volcano on Martinique in 1902 is included because it resulted in the demise of the Rice Rat, the only species since 1492 that can be said to have become extinct without human intervention. And there is much more…