Welcome to the companion website for the upcoming The Extinctuary: Reckoning with Apocalypse and Anthropocene Exploratory Seminar. We are very excited for this event, taking place on Monday, December 11 – Tuesday, December 12, 2023, and we look forward to seeing everyone soon.  Please feel free to explore this website.  We will strive to make sure that the most up-to-date information is installed.  Thank you.

Executive Summary

“In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches”
—Paul Ehrlich 

How do we account for what is no longer here? This exploratory seminar proposes an interdisciplinary reckoning with the apocalypse of extinction. “Extinction” here is meant in the most capacious sense: species extinction, mass extinction, human extinction, language extinction, and the like. What sorts of interventions have been successful in the fight to stave off extinction? If art serves, in the words of Marcel Duchamp, to “make the invisible, visible,” then art might be simultaneously the most potent and harmless weapon in the collective effort to stave off this self-induced apocalypse we have inflicted upon the planet. To what degree can people be compelled to care about something that is no longer there? Is the direct experience of extinction the only argument convincing enough to dissuade us from our toxic collective present-bias? How can we teach each new generation to care about what is, for us, a postapocalypse, and is, for them, the new normal? How do we reconcile the paradox of being both the source and the destination of the asteroid of the Anthropocene? These seem impossible questions to answer, but that hasn’t stopped many from trying. We propose inviting a selection of those thinkers, scholars, and artists to discuss the ways they have grappled with these questions.

Workshop Organizers

Alex Rehding, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Evander Price, Assistant Professor of Humanities (Teaching), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen