Pinksummer is pleased to announce Mark Dion’s new exhibition

THE MELANCHOLY ENTOMOLOGIST AND OF TALES OF ECOLOGICAL DESPAIR

The exhibition will open on 10 May 2025, 6-9 pm

and will be on view until 13.09.2025

Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 3 – 7.30 p.m. or by appointment

 

 

Press release in form of interview

 

Chapter I

DDT

Pinksummer: “To reflect on the ethics of love for all creatures in all its details this is the difficult task assigned to the time in which we live,” wrote musicologist physician Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965). Silent Spring the original title, the forerunner manifesto book of the Environmental Movement by biologist Rachel Carson is dedicated to Schweitzer and his special conception of ethics. Published in 1962 Silent Spring , it was a true denunciation with respect to the use of pesticides and herbicides , and it is also thanks to the book that in 1972 the use of DDT was banned in the United States, the insecticide was banned in Italy in 1978. Carson wonders why in those late 1950s the voices of spring, insects, birds were silent in many quarters of America. He goes on to explore the devastating effects of DDT, which not only harms wildlife but also destroys the entire ecological balance of water and soil, and concludes, “Are pesticides really necessary?”. The discovery of DDT was attributed in 1939 to Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948 “for the discovery of the great efficacy of DDT as a contact poison against many arthropods.” What did DDT, the first modern insecticide, represent to humanity in that hot, positivist era?

 

Mark Dion: What it represented was the control of nature. Like much of the post war positivist thinking around science, including the “Green Revolution”, the notion of better living through chemistry. ( The actual slogan of the DuPont Corporation was “Better Things for Better Living….Through Chemistry”). The idea that public good could be served by the application of new generations of chemicals including, fertilizers, biocides, water resistant compounds, lubricants, was largely unchanged until Rachel Carson and others looked at the undesirable ecological side effects of the massive application of industrial chemicals over time. While there was a lot of lip service to the control of nature in the service of humankind, the reality was that these innovations where profoundly in the service of capitalism first and human welfare second, and ecological well being not at all. All over the world, a pattern became well established of using science (chemistry, engineering, forestry, urban planning, etc.) for short term economic and social gain, while ignoring long term environmental and public health consequences. Rachel Carson is truly one of the legitimate heroes of the 20th Century. A gifted writer, uncompromising scientists and blessed with amazing courage and patience, she fought an unprecedented battle with industry and the state. She was of course correct about DDT and others Environmental poisons, but she had to withstand attacks from dirty industry executives, politicians and the press. They were mercilessly in their vitriol, which was often frankly misogynist. She prevailed and ushered in a new generation of environmentalists and protections for wild places and public health. Needless to say, pesticides are a necessity with regards to public health and agriculture as we practice them today. Biocides should be thought of as a last resort solution, and the long term consequences of their application must be throughly understood and the cost to the ecosystem considered paramount. We have learned in the west that the people who develop these chemical fixes can not be trusted to police themselves and must always be regarded as putting profit over safety.

 

Chapter II

Body Horror – Entomological Cinema and Literature

PS: With respect to the body-horror genre, insects take center stage both directly and mediately. Moving from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, via David Cronemberg’s 1986 film The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum, to Jan Mc Ewan’s 2020 The Cockroach, considered a political pamphlet homage to The Metamorphosis. Unlike Kafka’s mutant Gregor Samsa, who wakes up a giant insect, Mc Ewan’s Jim Sans, “a perceptive fellow, but not at all profound,” wakes up after a night of restless dreams as prime minister of England. Jim turned human takes very little time, unlike Gregor initially quite clumsy as an insect, to learn to move his hands, climb stairs with only two feet, and above all to effectively understand the use of Twitter. Seth Brundle, the protagonist of The Fly, whose mutation is not abrupt but progressive, unlike Gregor and Jim, beyond the shaggy hairs growing on his back, notices that something in him is changing because he feels stronger, more resilient, and sexually more performant, and since when the body changes the mind also follows, he becomes more and more arrogant. Both Seth and Kafka’s Gregor, The two protagonists who transform into insects, move from fear to curiosity, and the mutation at times is experienced as a kind of liberation. Do entomological literature and cinema represent the complex relationship between humans and insects? Does the insect represent the other than itself, even to the point of containing alien elements in relation to human perception?

 

MD: The insect is the ultimate other. So much of insect’s being, is an irritant to the modern urban sensibility of being beyond nature. Some of the disgust articulated in the fictions you mention relates to the uncanny aspects of insect body architecture- too many legs, a different kind of symmetry, strange transformative lifecycles, voracious eating habits, another kind of reproduction. Perhaps even more unsettling is the notion that insects remind us that we are also animals implicated in a complex web of life, which we just can’t seem to entirely control. Every cockroach in a kitchen, mosquito bite, head louse in a child’s classroom, reminds us that we have not yet transcended nature. Of course we hate to be reminded that we are animals because it also reminds us that we are mortal. So when we speak about being concerned about  insect population collapse, it can be a hard sell to a general public. “Good riddance”, many will respond, since they don’t realize how utterly dependent life on earth is on invertebrates. Sure it is easy to motivate people to save pandas, elephants and dolphins (survival of the cutest), although we are still not doing a very good job, but is difficult to motivate people to preserve insect population numbers. For many insects are synonymous with pests, despite the appeal of fireflies and butterflies.

 

Chapter III

Pasolini and the Disappearance of the Fireflies

PS: If Mc Ewan wrote The Cockroach in 2020 against Brexit, Pier Paolo Pasolini in the pages of “Corriere della Sera” in 1975, used the metaphor of the disappearance of the fireflies to launch a violent attack on the Christian Democrats, the then majority party in Italy. Pasolini begins by distinguishing Fascist Fascism from Christian Democrat Fascism, which he holds responsible for the sudden moral decline of the Italian people, transformed in a very short time into a people of consumers, forgetful of every value that had connoted them until then (homeland, family, religion, savings): “(…) That phenomenon that happened in Italy about ten years ago. In the early 1960s due to water pollution (the blue rivers, the clear irrigation ditches) fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was lightning fast and dazzling. After a few years the fireflies were gone.” Pasolini concludes with the phrase “I would give the entire Montedison for a firefly,” Montedison was an Italian industrial group dedicated to chemistry and agribusiness. Insects in fact are strong indicators with respect to the health of the environment, Pasolini traces the pollution of nature to moral decay, and this analogy could be applicable to the suffering of honey bees or other species of pollinating insects about human action. Dante in the Divine Comedy often mentions insects, and if in Paradise (Canto XXXI) compares the jubilation of the angels to a “host of bees bursting into bloom,” in Canto III of Inferno the sloths, including Pope Celestine V who had abdicated, are tormented naked by flies and wasps until they bleed. Dante died of malaria, by the way. In ancient times, the invasion of locusts or other insect pests was actually perceived as synonymous with man’s moral decay.What does the melancholic entomologist think about these analogies flowing from the natural environment to human moral decay in this world of ours in which global extracinic capitalism has become turbocharged and supranational?

 

MD: In the phenomenon of insect population collapse we have a paradigmatic example of The West’s suicidal relationship to the nature world. The instruments of this suicide, are not razors, revolvers, pills or train tracks, but a myriad of factors from pesticides and light pollution, to unwise land use and pollution. The driving factor is not depression and hopelessness but extreme capitalism. The drive to protect insects is not merely aesthetic or ethical, as valuable as these factors are, but overwhelmingly it is essential to survival. We must protect insects out of self preservation. Insects provide so many ecological services from pollination to food for vertebrates like birds, to being essential in the process of cycling nutrients and energy. Living in the USA at the moment, is to witness the triumph of the values of extreme capitalism over all other systems of value. The only system of value in place seems today or those of money and power, short term gain and making an overwhelmingly beneficial deal. The consequences of this intensely antisocial value system are reflected in ethical breakdown and the rise of authoritarianism, and this will have deep and pernicious results. Part of this culture of brute capitalism is also a breakdown in rationality and dismissal of long term research science. Without committed long term environmental research it is impossible to understand the scope of ecological degradation. Part of the melancholic aspect of our entomologist is that the scope of environmental catastrophe is overwhelming. I read extensively on the subject of “the insect apocalypse” and became interested in a number of aspects of the situation. The first is that the phenomenon was first identified by amateurs rather then entomologists working for the state or a University or museum. I loved how this seemed like a bridge to old fashioned natural history study, where citizen science played such a huge role. Something else that was inspiring was how international and cooperative the discipline seems to be, with scientists and amateurs sharing information across the globe. I was very influenced by Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of Dr. David Wagner, an insect biologist from University of Connecticut. Since so little good news is coming from the world of invertebrate studies, I imagined him as necessarily being melancholic. Ironically when I meet him he told me he was not melancholic but rather fired up and activated. He said now is the moment for action and engagement and there is not time for melancholy. While I agree, I also think mourning is an appropriate response for our moment and it definitely does not exclude action.

 

Chapter IV

Insects Food of the Future

PS: And what does your entomologist protagonist think when it is announced to him with tractousness that insects will be our food of the future? What insects are we talking about? Considering that insects have declined by 80 percent in recent decades, and he knows that insects are the lynchpin of biodiversity: they are consumers and food for birds and reptiles, and without insects there would no longer be 70 percent of the plant species we know. There are some who even in postmodernity call for the return of DDT to defeat the Anopheles mosquito in Africa, which is responsible for malaria.

 

MD: There have long been calls for insects to be used as food in the future. It seems to be a pretty narrow group of insects they consider for consumption, which includes crickets and grasshoppers. This may solve some human protein problems but it will have no impact on insect diversity issues, other then freeing up land now used for cattle and feed crops. Considering the interconnectedness of things a sharp drop in any population of organisms is something to be concerned about. Other vertebrates subsistence on insect consumption- birds, fish, reptiles and quite a few mammals. Numerous plants depend of insect pollination. As you say, many  insects are indicator species, giving us a glimpse into the wider environmental health of an ecosystem. When we are getting such clear feedback messages from the world around us, it is at our peril that we ignore it. I don’t see a widespread return to DDT or at least not to the excesses of its previous use. The battle with the Anopheles Mosquito is a example of evolution in process. As we apply new technologies of exclusion, biological and chemical control the mosquito constantly evolves to thwart our efforts to extinguish it. While it is amazing to see how quickly evolution can work, this is serious since the mosquitoes transmit the organism which causes malaria which effects tens of thousands of people.

 

Chapter V

The Devil’s Garden

PS: Speaking of biodiversity and monocultures, in the highly human-risk rainforests of the Amazon, biodiverse areas par excellence, one sometimes comes across mysterious areas where biodiversity disappears, and only Duroia hirsuta trees stand there. Local people call these areas Devil’s garden. The responsibility for the monoculture of Duroia hirsuta lies not with an evil spirit but with a species of ant, the Mymelachista schumanni that nests in the Trunk of this tree, killing with lethal doses of formic acid every other plant species in these areas, thus the ant ensures its colony an abundant amount of nesting sites. A long-term benefit, considering that colonies of Mymelachista schumanni can live up to 800 years. Isn’t the behavior of the lemon ant awfully similar compared to our intensive agriculture? Could planet Earth live if it was turned into an immense Devil’s garden?

 

MD: Perhaps the question should be, would it be worth living on an earth which was only a Devil Garden. Maybe these ant colonies seem particularly frightening since we see ourselves, in our immense transformative power, reflected in them. I am very drawn to ecological parables like the one about the Devil Garden. When I stated making the kind of work I do today, in the late 1980s, many of my sculptures and installations took such tales of ecological calamity as a starting point. This was pretty much the moment when the term Biodiversity was coming into popular use. It is such a beautiful and powerful idea, meaning the variety and variability of life on earth. I think discovering the notion of biodiversity somehow gave meaning to my practice of as an artist. With so many artist form my generation, it is easy to understand what we are against, being so critically focused, but it is not always easy to understand what we are for. I am for biodiversity. The story of the Devil’s Garden is a great illustration of the unforeseen consequences of environmental destruction. Once something is degraded, and then left to recover, there is no guarantee what returns will be the same things the site started with. Something will come back, but probably not what was there before. The same is true for fisheries. If one takes all the fish, eventually something will return to fill the empty niche but not often exactly the same fish.

 

Chapter VI

Donald Trump insect unconscious

PS: These days there is much talk about Trump and his tariffs that rattle Markets from East to West, traversing the globe in a divisive sense. Wouldn’t it be wacky if your entomologist produced a dream of the body-horror genre, turning the controversial American president into an insect. What insect with a Latin name could be the one dreamed up by the unconscious creativity of the melancholy entomologist?

 

MD: It is an insult to the world of invertebrates to call Trump an insect. Even a virus does not deserve the indignity of comparison to the President. Much worst then body-horror fiction is the culture of sadism and injustice daily paraded on American screens.

Perhaps if we did need to give him a Latin binomial name it could be Necrophorus Rex. King of the Dead.

 

 

Thanks to Monica Rivera for her precious research

 

Special thanks to Strega del Castello

for having shared with us some of the secrets of her enchanted world