How to Become Human?

Terike Haapoja

doi:10.5334/mjfar.83

Abstract

Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja’s three channel video installation Becoming (Gustafsson&Haapoja 2020) explores emergent ways of relating to ourselves, others and the world. In the video 37 interviewees chart the current state of the world and its people. They contemplate phenomena that are in bud at this very moment, and which should be nurtured. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication Bud Book – A Manual for Earthly Living that makes suggestions for how to live as a human being in a world endangered by the old way of being human. In her essay How to Become Human Terike Haapoja discusses the problematic universalism of the anthropocene discourse and what art can contribute to the task of becoming human otherwise.

Highlights

Instead of a climate crisis, it would more accurate to talk about a crisis of humanity
The concept of the Anthropocene views human beings as subjectless agents, like a force of nature, its actions being directed not so much by political struggle as by an ungoverned, species-specific hive intelligence guided by a short-term pursuit of interests
Image 1: Gustafsson&Haapoja’s Becoming (2020) is a three channel video installation that takes as its starting point the fact that we live in the time of global ecological and ethical crises, which requires a dramatic re-evaluation of humanity and its relationship to the rest of the world