A worm crossed the street

With ‘A worm crossed the street’, Nadja Bournonville takes us into the archive of Vienna’s Natural History Museum, the shelves of which are filled with animals transformed into dermoplastic exhibits, skeletons and wet preparations. These archived animals are a shadow not only of their former selves, but sometimes of their entire species. How does our relationship to the specimens at the museum as representatives of their species change in an age of declining biodiversity? With each species that becomes extinct, its genetic information is irrevocably lost, and the process of disappearance is irreversible. Preservation, photographs, and digital reanimation cannot halt that process, but merely accompany it, and follow the traces of that which has disappeared. The 377 black-and-white photographs in the book also reference Inger Christensen’s ever important poem Alphabet, laid out in accordance with the Fibonacci sequence, with excerpts here accompanying the photographs.

FOTOHOF edition Bd./vol. 310