Elke Krasny, ‘The Museum and the Anthropocene.’In Curating as Feminist Organizing, edited by Elke Krasny and Lara Perry, 21-31, London: Routledge, 2023 —

Elke Krasny. ‘The Museum and the Anthropocene. Ecological Grief, Planetary
Mourning, Healing Feminist Curating.’ 2023
The essay introduces the museum as a modern institution, through which we can study the making of the culture of the Anthropocene. Analysed as an institution of capture, best understood through a theory of dead objects kept alive, the museum represents the way the Anthropocene reorganized and regulated life and death. Today, planetary ruination is understood to result from humans as geological and climatalogical force. This ruination followed from the Enlightenment ideology of white Man’s universalized supremacy, which supported the formation of colonial patriarchy and racial capitalism. Today’s ecological grief needs new collective rituals and spiritual and emotional articulations for planetary mourning to deal with the aftermath of the ongoing sixth mass extinction event. Arguing that the museum, precisely because it is a storehouse of death-making anthropogenic politics, is a site for which the essay prefigurates new forms of healing feminist curating, it also acknowledges that such healing has to confront legacies of imperial, bourgeois, and white-centric feminism, aligned with Anthropocene hegemony.

https://www.routledge.com/Curating-as-Feminist-Organizing/Krasny-Perry/p/book/9781032065304