“Until you use me up”: Producing Extinctions and Performing Intimacies in Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne’s Drowned Forest (2015)

Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne’s 16mm. film installation Drowned Forest (Istanbul Biennial, 2015) explores the role of the visual in the construction and negotiation of human-nonhuman relations. The installation points to how art has, at times, produced extinction, including and perhaps especially by rendering it more palatable to humans, promising to document and preserve the “vanishing.” Drowned Forest follows a seemingly-human, dark-skinned animated figure who wears a mask modeled on a late-nineteenth-century sea bear mask of the Haida people of the Pacific Northwest. This character journeys to a subterranean or subaquatic realm where animal life ostensibly has sought refuge from humans. A subtle sampling of Bill Withers’s song “Use Me” (1972) implies that the figure experiences desire for connection with a nonhuman animal dwelling below. This intertextual reference recasts human-nonhuman relation as a seductive back-and-forth in which symbiosis threatens to tip over into parasitism, or already has. Importantly, the only nonhuman animal featured in the installation is nearly extinct. While the 16mm. film rolls, a video of a captive rhinoceros is projected into an adjacent hunk of resin. The recorded animal assumes the cast of a holograph or an amber-preserved “curiosity” from a bygone age. However, Drowned Forest also raises the possibility of non-exploitative human-nonhuman intimacies through references to Haida practices in particular. Inscribed within indigenous knowledges are concrete responsibilities to humans and nonhumans. The installation seems to offer performance as a possible alternative mode of establishing visual and other-sensorial interspecies relations constituted through mutual care.