Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae is a peer-reviewed, non-funded, independent, quarterly academic journal. All rights of featured content of website and PDF publication are reserved. Editor in Chief: Giovanni Aloi. 2017
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
This issue of Antennae and the next are part of a project informed by the exhibition Making Nature: How We See Animals curated by Honor Beddard at Wellcome Collection (London) in 2016-17. This first installment, Making Nature, looks at the construction of nature as a cultural pursuit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on issues of visibility and invisibility, both cultural and ecological, to critically appraise the methodological approaches that have defined the philosophies of the discipline. Technologies of visibility like taxidermy, dioramas, macro-photography, and illustration are here juxtaposed to highlight the complicity of art and science in the production of fictional narratives about the world we live in. This outlook should however not be misinterpreted as an attempt to diminish the epistemic importance of natural history but as an invitation to reach further deep into the discipline’s productive core and to devise new natural histories for the twenty-first century. It is in this context that the next installment, also co-edited
with Honor Beddard, titled Re-making Nature will more closely focus on the work of contemporary artists whose practice entails revealing the constructedness of nature as a concept to map and untangle important nevralgic and yet under scrutinized junctions in our coevolutional histories with the rest of the natural world.
The Togo-Cameroon hunting pavilion at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris encouraged cynegetic tourism in Africa, largely through the inclusion of three large habitat dioramas. MORE >>
Making Nature was an exhibition held at Wellcome Collection in London between the 1st of December 2016 and the 21st of May 2017. It explored how humans have constructed the
notion of nature over time, a question that has captivated philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, ethicists and artists for centuries. Curator Honor Beddard talks to us about this
pioneering exhibition. MORE >>
In this essay, Giovanni Aloi focuses on an axpect of Donna Haraway’s ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy’ argument that was overlooked by the author: the important role played by decorum in the normativizing function of museum taxidermy. MORE >>
This essay examines the object history of the Feejee Mermaid, a taxidermy creature created from the top half of a mummifi ed orangutan
and the lower body and tail of a salmon, which defi es the category between nature and art.. MORE >>
For over a hundred years, habitat dioramas have been the soul of natural history museums around the world. Firmly built into the architectural fabric of the institution and astutely combining sculptural, painterly, and theatrical idioms, dioramas have been regularly
understood as truth. MORE >>
The current planetary environmental
emergency urges us to ask afresh: How can we simultaneously be part of a long history of nature, and yet be so late in realising what has happened? The recent development in ecological discourses make exhibition Mark Dion: Systema Metropolis from 2007 ever so
relevant. MORE >>
Louis Pasteur’s published study of the French silkworm pandemic (1865-1870) helped visualise the invisible world. This essay examines how Pasteur mobilised new media
to categorise and visualise the vast cultural ecology that had shaped France’s silkworm disease. MORE >>
In a time of climate-change denial and suspicion of scientifi c expertise, where science’s place in American culture is especially contested, Magnify considers the role of amateur naturalists historically and today. MORE >>
Doug Young is one of only a few artists skilled in the labor-intensive technique of reverse painting on glass. These paintings address present- day concerns about the precarious state of the environment by taking natural
history museums and their display aesthetics as their subject. MORE >>
Since January 2019 Marc Beattie has captured the captured, snapping a subject daily and amassing a cache currently of over a third of the Avian Class that have ever visited Norfolk,
and then never departed their uncanny dioramic setting. MORE >>
Micrographia was published in January 1665, the first major publication of the Royal Society, it became the first scientific best-seller, inspiring a wide public interest in the new science of
Dr Mario A. Di Gregorio explores Haeckel’s unique idea of “monism” which lies behind the mesmerising illustrations of his most famous
work, Kunstformen Der Natur. MORE >>
Isabella Kirkland’s work examines man’s relationship to the natural world through intricate oil paintings in the style of sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch Master
still life. Her life-size depictions of plants and animals are precisely rendered and anatomically accurate, the result of extensive research at natural history museums. MORE >>
Simultaneously present and absent these shadowy animal traces connect with key environmental issues, such as habitat loss and the extinction of animal species. Lorraine Simms’s drawings are poetic meditations on change and loss - silent witnesses to the gradual disappearance of the wild. MORE >>
Throughout the galleries of Making Nature, Abbas Akhavan situated taxidermy animals on the ground and corners, away from the lighting, signage, and pedestals, the staples of classical
Isaella Kirkland’s work examines man’s relationship to the natural world through intricate oil paintings in the style of sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch Master still life. Her life-size depictions of plants and animals are precisely rendered and anatomically accurate, the result of extensive research at natural history museums. MORE>>