“What does it actually mean to people from different backgrounds and experiences to face extinction?”

There are many extinct and threatened species in museum displays, and this can be a complicated and emotional subject for visitors. Over the last year, Manchester Museum has been part of the collaborative AHRC funded project, Thinking Through Extinction. The purpose has been to explore how the current global mass extinction event is communicated by and encountered in public spaces. The project has brought together academics at the University of Leeds, curators at Manchester Museum (The University of Manchester), editors at Corridor8 and artists and art writers across the UK.

The key element of the Museum collaboration was the Voicing Silence residency led by Liverpool-based artist Laurence Payot, exploring the emotional impact of extinction. Originally designed to take place in the Museum, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a programme of online workshops last summer with Dr Rachel Webster, Anna Bunney, and Dr Hannah-Lee Chalk from Manchester Museum along with collaborating artists Scott Farlow, Jon Hughes, Laura Spark, Stacey Atkinson and Mark Hilditch, and involving over 150 participants.

Workshop participants included refugees and asylum seekers invited through Manchester City of Sanctuary; Welcome to English (Hull); home schooled children; families and other members of the public invited through an open call. Using creative writing, choreography, animation and music, participants engaged with the topic of extinction across 14 workshops.

The final artwork from this residency is a haunting, holographic video installation, co-produced by Payot and her team of collaborating artists. It draws on the content created by workshop participants while thinking about biodiversity loss and viewing extinct animals and plants in the Museum’s collections. If COVID-19 restrictions allow, Manchester Museum hopes to be able to exhibit the physical artwork.

Inspired by Thinking Through Extinction research and the Museum’s collections, Corridor 8’s facing Extinction, is an online and printed output that engages creatively with and prompts reflection on biodiversity loss, recovery and memory. Alongside newly commissioned writing by Anna Souter and Daisy Hildyard that explore human and plant perspectives, and their subtle hauntings, facing Extinction features artwork created by the workshop participants.

“Through these words and artworks we invite you to enter into this dark and threatening ‘now’; to feel it in your limbs, to conjure it with words, to hear it as sounds, to break it down and look at it frame by frame. Is extinction something we can embody, or inhabit? And if we could somehow learn to explore that embodiment, and to share it with others, would it help us to change, to act?” – Lara Eggleton & Stefan Skrimshire

Laurence Payot’s website details creative process for the Voicing Silence residency at Manchester Museum.

A digital exploration of Laurence Payot’s artwork ‘Voicing Silence’ can be seen here.

The beautiful and thought provoking publication, facing Extinction is also available to view.