Enter the Zoöp
Nina van Hartskamp’s Worlds Within project, installed as part of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s In Search of the Pluriverse exhibition.
“The zoöp model makes the interests of nonhuman life part of organisational decision making.”
In late April Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum for architecture, design and digital culture, became the world’s first zoöp: an organisation that is structured to consider and protect the interests of non-human life, including the appointment to its board of a representative for the voices and interests of non-human life. Going forward, the institute’s programming, governance, structure and activities will aim to support “the sustaining network of exchange of all human and non-human life.”
Developed out of a research project begun by the institute’s Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, the zoöp is an attempt by Het Nieuwe Instituut to reflect upon the social and environmental issues facing the planet and “contribute to the development of an alternative logic” that may be better able to address them. As part of this change, the institute has appointed landscape architect Maike van Stiphout as its “Speaker for the Living”.
Working with Het Nieuwe’s board, van Stiphout will be given the operational authority to improve the institute’s impact on non-human life. “This could be the colour of installations so that it is easily visible for birds in the area,” Het Nieuwe notes, “or placing other-than-human life such as fungi, plants and animals centre stage in the museum’s design process going forward.” In this respect, the institute sees itself as a testbed for changes that could be rolled out more widely. Although Het Nieuwe is the world’s first zoöp, there are already 20 further proto-zoöps: organisations that are committed to working with elements of the model.
To find out more about zoöps and Het Nieuwe Instituut's commitment to the model, Disegno spoke to its general and artistic director Aric Chen. An edited version of the conversation follows below.
In Search of the Pluriverse.
Disegno So I suppose the first question is obvious: how do you pronounce it?
Aric Chen So it's it's a conflation of the words “zoë”, which is Greek for life, and cooperation. So it's zoöp [rhymes with co-op, ed.], short for zoöperation.
Disegno So how does it differ to, say, an institution coming out and saying, “We need to be more sustainable in the way in which we go about things and think about our surrounding environment, and so we're hiring a head of sustainability.” What sets this apart as a separate initiative?
Aric That's a very good question. The shorter, more technical answer is the way in which the framework works, which is that a Zoönomic institute appoints what's called a speaker for the living, who actually joins the board of directors on relevant matters. So it's about creating a space for non-human or more-than-human entities to be part of the decision-making process of an organisation at the very highest level. It’s not something that can easily get lost in various reporting lines, as often happens with sustainability initiatives in other organisations. Now, the speaker for the living is not a full board member, they have more of an observer status, but the intention is that they act as a part of the board on relevant issues.
Disegno And the longer answer?
Aric The broader or perhaps more complex answer is that it's about changing mindsets and an organisation’s worldview. A role like chief sustainability officer tends to get lost in the bureaucracy of an organisation – it’s still more of a suggestive role without much decision-making authority, but its place within organisational hierarchies tends to also obscure the reframing of how we operate in more-than-human or non-human-centric ways. Every organisation is different, but a chief sustainability officer is usually still working within human-centric ways of working. So even things like calling this person the speaker for the living, rather than chief sustainability officer, does, I think, make a difference.
In Search of the Pluriverse.
Disegno There's a certain dramatic or perforative quality to “speaker for the living”. It feels like a more intriguing statement, because one thing that can be said about “sustainability” is that it has become a buzzword: it means everything and nothing, and it gets thrown around a lot. So I was curious about the slightly attention-grabbing language that you've attached to this.
Aric I think the the use of language here is important and we really need to credit our researcher Klaas Kuitenbrouwer for this. Klaas is the initiator of the zoöp, which has evolved from a research project he began three or four years ago and then worked on in collaboration with many others. So if we went with “chief sustainability officer”, that would be continuing with business as usual. The very strong, not just implicit, but explicit message here, by contrast, is that business as usual is not good enough. We need to be jolted out of our complacency, but also out of our usual way of doing things. And that's why we hope this language will be effective. “Speaker for the living” really emphasises that we're not talking about just humans trying to do things at our convenience that are better, but in fact we’re actually giving agency to non-human entities.
Disegno Do you use the word “sustainability” at all?
Aric Not really in our relationship to the zoöp, no. It's really about ecological regeneration. Sustainability implies continuing to place humans at the centre of the world, and seeing the rest of the planet as existing mostly for our exploitation – we're just going to try to exploit it in a better way. We need to totally rethink the premise that the planet is there for our exploitation. Is it possible to not just exploit it in a less horrible way, but to actually operate in ways that are healing? And so we refer to our effort as not bringing about sustainability, but ecological regeneration. Can our actions find a way to heal the planet, instead of just minimising the damage that we do it?
Disegno How do you actually go about doing that? You see an increasing number of design projects focused around designing for non-human life or taking non-human life into account, for instance, which are very interesting but often risk becoming quite nebulous and vague: it's hard enough designing for humans and trying to take into account all of the considerations there, so how do you meaningfully design for a much broader spectrum?
Aric This goes back to this this point of why we use different terminology, because we need to think about the different roles, frames and mindsets that those terms imply. So sometimes you don't design, for example. Sometimes you actually do more by doing less. So that's where this notion of moving beyond a human-centred system comes, because within that former framework there's this idea that fixing things always requires human intervention – which is, again, a very human-centric perspective. So in many cases, it's about not intervening, which can be brought into the discussion when you have somebody who is there specifically to empathise with non-human entities.
In Search of the Pluriverse.
Disegno But how does that play out within a human institution?
Aric We don't know, which is why we’re really happy to test this – you don't know until you try. This is really part of a broader effort here at the Het Nieuwe Instituut to become more of a testing ground. Cultural institutions have rightly turned their attention to these seemingly endless social and ecological crises that we're confronted with, as a society, as a species, and as a planet. And there’s been a lot of good work in raising awareness and posing questions and issuing – albeit sometimes vague – calls to action. But given the urgency of the issues, posing questions, raising awareness and issuing vague calls to action is not enough. So what is the role of a cultural institution in determining what the next step might be? We're in a very privileged situation in that we can move faster than governments, and we don't have the same shareholder, commercial and other constraints that the private sector has. So we not only have the ability to take these risks, but we perhaps actually have the obligation to do so and try out some of these speculations that we exhibit or propose.
Disegno Like the zoöp.
Aric Right, it’s one example of this. It's a new idea and one that we think is viable enough to try, but also crazy sounding enough that perhaps it's only us who can try it. But this is the way new ideas work: they start off sounding really weird, but they’re only weird until they become real. And when they're real, if they somehow work, they become obvious. So we're at the weird to real stage, and we're going to try it out, see how it goes, share what we learned, and hopefully take it from real to obvious. Actually, it may be more obvious than we think, because there are already around 20 organisations across the world that have declared themselves proto-zoöps. They’re in the process of exploring becoming zoöps and we're the first to actually do it. We’re hoping more will follow suit.
Disegno It's an interesting thing, because it's an exciting announcement for the institution, but there’s a sense that, if this is to do its work, it should be a painful process for the institution. It should be disruptive and challenging. You’re sort of announcing that you’ve set yourself far more constraints going forward.
Aric Yes and no. Of course there will be constraints with it, but at the same time new ideas and new ways of working will also come out of it too. As they say, with every challenge comes an opportunity. Even in terms of looking at our exhibition-making practices, we have a new show that just opened called In Search of the Pluriverse for which we were actually able to reuse 90 to 92 per cent of materials from a previous exhibition. That's great, not only in terms of an ecological perspective, but also a cost-saving perspective, particularly with the price of materials going up so dramatically due to all the supply chain issues out there. So this is a pretty basic, low-hanging fruit – and it's probably still more in the realm of “sustainability” – but when we start thinking about how to go further and make our exhibition-making practices regenerative, that's where it could get really interesting. So stay tuned.
Interview Oli Stratford