I am god! Or, ‘I am death, the destroyer of worlds’?

Wouters has created a space / structure that works effectively by putting the spectator in an appropriately ambiguous position.

For the performance, the audience is seated along three sides of a gallery above the exhibition space. The seating is set up as individual workstations, the type we find in libraries where students go to study. Each post has a lamp, headphones, a folder with literature and even a pencil and pencil sharpener. The ‘curator’ encourages us to take notes, and even to sharpen our pencil (pencils are, of course, more environmentally friendly that plastic pens that are thrown away when they are empty).

The experience is provocative, amusing and chilling all at the same time. Peering down from above, we seem to be like gods. This is, after all, our position in the natural hierarchy, isn’t it? The human race is the apex of creation: mankind gazing down at the world and all the species of which he is master.

Wouters draws this perspective into doubt. While our position ‘in the gods’ might re-enforce our sense of mastery over nature, we are equally obliged to be mere students again, to listen and take notes and think, even though our lecturer / curator with the microphone, moving around the exhibits below, is a very young man wearing a leather jacket and basket-ball trainers. We are obliged to listen to a representative of the generation (Wouters is just 27 years old) that has most at stake in terms of environmental degradation, and we are obliged to witness the exhibits relating to the degradation that is, wittingly or unwittingly, our responsibility.

As the Canadian biologist David Suzuki has said: the human race was never thrown out of paradise; we are still here. We just don’t realise it.

We can question our perspective from other items in the collection that serve to link the elements together. On the 26 April 1336, the poet Petrarch climbed a mountain, just for the sake of climbing a mountain and gazing out at the landscape revealed below. This seemingly random event illustrates a fundamental human desire—to stand above nature, to capture space at a glance, to have that view from the top. The ‘curator’ climbs a model mountain and emerges at our height, in our gallery seats, reinforcing the point and challenging our lofty perspective.

The point is underscored by the decision taken on 1 January 1753 by the father of taxonomic biology, Linnaeus, to start categorising life so that all specimens can be identified and understood by their relationship to others. Humans impose a sense of harmony on the natural world that is entirely anthropocentric.

But do not despair, because Guideline no. 4 on the handout claims that, "ecology is not about guilt".

And indeed guilt, or blaming and shaming, is not an appropriate way to move forward. Can you blame a lonely lighthouse keeper for wanting the companionship of a domestic cat? Can we blame the loss of an entire species on a single keeper who was tired and wanted to go home to the warmth on a cold night? Did we know what we were doing when we walked out of Africa or conquered the Americas? Doesn’t every species require more space? Wouldn’t any species do what we do in taking up more space?

What we need, as Wouters puts it, is some good healthy doubt, to think about consequences and accept responsibility. In this age of information, how can you not know that environmental degradation and climate change is anthropogenic?

This conception is fruitful combination of site-specific and community theatre with live art and installation. It is a concept which promises a great deal for cultural interventions of the future. And we do need to keep pushing at the boundaries of art. Humankind is entering a period of transition, the reverse of the transition through which we passed about 200 years ago when our ancestors ran out of logs to chuck on the fire and humankind moved into the period with capital letters: The Age of Fossil Fuels.

The performing art forms have adapted themselves to give voice to new generations and mirror our preoccupations: realism, naturalism, impressionism, expressionism, Brecht, modernism, postmodernism, and even all the technology that goes into film and computer generated images. But now, after blowing the stocks of fossil fuels laid down over millions of years in a 200-year-long bonfire of the vanities, we are inevitably entering another epoch: the Age of Scarce Resources, fossil fuels being one of them, but soil, fresh water and biodiversity being others.

Like it or not, we will have to make this transition and we will need art forms capable of revealing our participation as humans in this great transformation, to reveal the desires that brought us to this junction and the desires that will sustain us and the declining resources and number of species with which we share this planet in the decades to come. We need art forms that are going to stimulate us to use our imagination and think about the unknown. As Tony Judt put it: ‘What comes next?’

The collection exhibited in the Zoological Institute for Extinct Species can be seen every day except Mondays until the end of festival on weekdays from 9:30 to 17:00 and at weekends from 10:00 until 18:00. The performances take place on the 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24 and 25 of May at 21:00. There is a performance on the 12 May at 19:00.

I advise you to see the performance. The intervention of the young ‘curator’ makes the links apparent and equally compromises our position as an anonymous audience, anonymous and inactive witnesses to this transition with which we are faced. And this is what art does best: it doesn’t send us messages but makes links that challenge our perspective and make us think beyond the boxes.

In a recent interview with a Flemish newspaper Wouters said that we can do something about environmental degradation. He quoted the German filmmaker Werner Hertzog as an inspiration behind these 36 images. As Hertzog has said, we don’t have access to the images that make these ecological events concrete in our minds, making it possible for humankind to adequately assess our position on this planet. The exhibits are a collection of images that attempt to redress this lack.

Wouters also mentions someone on the radio who claimed that the melting of the Arctic ice cap would actually reduced greenhouses gas emissions because container ships and oil tankers would not have to go all the way around Africa. To most people, the melting ice is an abstract concept, the consequences too distant to be apprehended.

So, Wouters ends his curatorial lecture, once the audience has descended to roam amongst the exhibits in the collection, with a quote from James Balog, the National Geographic photographer who made an entire, full-length documentary film of images of the retreating glaciers and melting ice caps using time-lapse photography. His TED talk is provided on a screen as part of the collection. For those of you who haven’t seen it, you can find it at www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss.html.

His film, Chasing Ice, has not been widely distributed by the major cinema chains. Obviously, the hard-won images taken under extreme and hostile conditions by real human beings showing the reality of what is happening cannot compete with the money-making potential of computer generated fantasies in Hollywood blockbusters.

Lastly, to round off, Wouters returns to two other exhibits in the collection, a promise made between St Francis and a wolf, and a statement made by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to once again clearly make those necessary links. Derrida commented that the human race is the only species that actually makes (and breaks) promises. Perhaps, it’s time to start making some small promises of our own, individually, to future generations and to the biosphere itself. We could simply promise to be aware of the consequences of our actions, our lifestyles, and our perspective.

This exhibition and performance should travel the globe: we need much more of this.

The first ‘guideline’ for the Zoological Institute for Extinct Species is:

The Institute should never be humble.

Considering our topic, modesty is not an option. Whenever there is a centre, the Institute should not hesitate to occupy it.

I thoroughly agree.