‘Nothing comes without its World’ was on show at Cloudigital Art from 9 May 2024 - 9 September 2024. It is an exhibition that makes-meaning with the wisdom of creatures that have not changed in 110 million years. Sea Turtles have borne witness to earth's tumultuous history, surviving catastrophic events and evolving through ages. We wonder, if we were to ask the right questions, what we might learn from their practical wisdoms and experience. Despite this wisdom, the challenge of the current colonial, capitalist and Neoliberal induced apocalypse may prove their greatest trial. This exhibition, "Nothing Comes without its World: Shimmering stories of human and more-than-human kinship" delves into the interconnectedness of these creatures with our world and what opportunities (found and missed) exist in building better kinship with them, and with each other.
The turtles come now with a much more complex world, and it is with this provocation, we created an exhibition and radical an-archiving process of deconstructing or subverting traditional archival practices to challenge dominant narratives and power structures. We attempts to “to stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) that exists between conservation efforts and ongoing social justice-to-come. It attempts to dwell in the space between the ecological and the socio-political, between the living and the ghosts, and between the seen and the unseen. As the turtles wash ashore, they are met with active and embodied care, compassionate marine wildlife rescuers give essential medical attention, love, radical hospitality (the ethical obligation of prioritising the needs of the other/ubuntu) and rehabilitation, nursing the turtles back to health. Their attentiveness and convivial warmth is exquisite to wit(h)ness, in a time where we face multispecies extension and a political ecological crisis. These acts of care are radical expressions of hope and love made visible.
Yet sometimes, understandably in their lament, when losing a sick turtle to plastic ingestion or human-related injury, a rescuer might cry out: “People are the problem!”. The reality is only some people are the problem, and much of the issues turtles are suffering from come from the 1% richest countries and communities.
The efforts to save the turtles, and the climate is also a class struggle, visible and invisible, awash with ghosts and hauntings from coloniality. If we return to the wisdom of the turtles, in such a moment of crises and ecological grief, we realise that if turtles come with worlds or as Donna Haraway (2018) famously put it in a conversation with Thyrza Goodeve: “Nothing comes without its World” - knowing this, if we are to care for stranded turtles wrapped in ghost nets, we also need to attend to the world they hatch in, the world they swim back to, their homeland. A place where “natal homing” for Indigenous Zulu and Tsonga people is not possible, a coastline which is haunted with long legacies of exclusion, violence and erasure. Both realities are true, and both require acts of care.
