Contamination as Collaboration: Creating a Collaborative Archive in “Frames of the Anthropocene”
Contamination as Collaboration: Creating a Collaborative Archive in “Frames of the Anthropocene”

Summary/Abstract: “Frames of the Anthropocene” is a collaborative digital exhibition launched by the Virtual Museum of the Anthropocene in 2021. Envisioned as a work-in-progress, the exhibition simultaneously archives and performs the memory of the ongoing anthropogenic changes in different environments. It is argued that many of the photographs, while seemingly focusing on various kinds of human-produced waste, in fact represent multifarious constellations and collaborations, as the waste is gradually integrated into divergent green spaces. The article foregrounds the vibrancy (Bennett, 2010) and processual character of these groupings, viewing them as depictions of temporal and spatial negotiations involving multiple actants that orient the viewers’ gaze towards both human and other-than-human modalities and agencies. By bringing into focus “nonhuman beings and unfamiliar timescales” (Morton, 2017), the author interprets the exhibition as a way of engaging the viewers and potential contributors alike in a reflection on various modes of collaboration discovered through the archive-in-progress. Finally, the article analyses the ways in which “Frames of the Anthropocene” explores the dynamics of “contamination as collaboration” (Tsing, 2015) both in its content and its processual, collaborative formula, thus attempting to transgress anthropocentrism in our understanding of the current epoch.

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