Sophie Davis

Writer


Life and practice in motion: Alicia Frankovich’s Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies

Originally published by The Art Paper,  July 2022

 Of course, garden snails are the aliens, introduced, whereas fossils show that Alicia Frankovich’s installation Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies tangles with the structure of German art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29). A strange and ambitious image mapping project, the Mnemosyne Atlas comprises sixty-three large boards covered with black cloth, upon which Warburg carefully arranged hundreds of black-and-white photographic reproductions—featuring artwork from the Renaissance, the Middle East and Western cosmology, along with contemporary advertising and newspaper clippings. In doing so, he attempted nothing less than to capture “bewegtes Leben” (life in motion or animated life) stemming from antiquity.1 Conventional in its rooting within a predominantly Western art history, the Mnemosyne Atlas also presented a radical departure in linking and juxtaposing images without explanation, as a metaphor for knowledge and collective memory. Warburg and his atlas have recently reemerged into contemporary discussion2—probably because the panels resemble the networked interfaces that shape our daily social interactions and access to information. 

In Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies, Frankovich takes the ideas and physical blueprint of the Mnemosyne Atlas and twists them to think through life in motion within the contemporary present. Her installation at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū comprises a group of illuminated, double-sided image boards suspended across the gallery. Saturated and vibrant, they combine montaged images of living and nonliving materials, natural phenomena and technology. Together, these image-sculptures look like huge, disjointed windows open on a laptop screen, or the results of a strange and knotty image search algorithm that has spat out and grouped vastly different things: coral, fungi, a shimmering space blob on a screenshot from Nasa’s Instagram, a placenta, a powdery moon crater. Flowers in bloom are layered over the tendrils of sea anemones, rocks beside a charging Macbook. Many images confuse a sense of scale and matter. One might be of stars or bacteria, another could be a faraway planet or a closeup of organic material. These back-lit panels, which appear as if frozen in flux, are accompanied by two small monitors, pulsing with a second-long clip of what appears to be a microbe and thermal satellite imaging. 

The body has long been central within the practice of Frankovich. Currently based in Naarm Melbourne, she has been working between Australia and Berlin for the last decade, across live, multi-participant performances and installation. While Frankovich’s earlier work focused on the subject positions of audience and performer within social and labour infrastructures—exploring ideas of the individual versus collective body and the politics of public space—her more recent projects, including Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies, pursue an expansion of categories such as ‘the body’, ‘labour’ and ‘infrastructure.’ Combining radically different subjects together and without hierarchy, Frankovich’s installation specifically pushes against taxonomy—the scientific or museological practice of naming, describing and classifying, which is an inherently subjective mechanism of power and control—towards other ways of describing and experiencing life. And by referencing Warburg’s atlas and digital infrastructures, it also connects the origins and activity of classification, to a relatively new ecology of images controlled by tech corporations. In an era where information is often grouped like-with-like and in hierarchies that can result in unseen content filters and the unregulated spread of misinformation, Frankovich’s installation considers how unexpected interactions create new possibilities. 

Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies draws from a dense network of discussion that explores how non-human centred ways of understanding nature can also disrupt binary understandings of bodies, genders, and life itself. This discourse includes and echoes indigenous knowledge and, from here in Aotearoa, the organising principle of whakapapa. Writers like Emilie Rākete have explored how whakapapa, as a “holistic system of relationality” that affirms shared lineages in relation to Papatūānuku, also addresses emergent theoretical concepts such as posthumanism or political ecology.3 By placing images of lichens, invertebrates, viruses and food sources, with others that show the vastness of the universe, the artist connects each within a living, cosmological system. This kind of mapping demonstrates the contingency of any living being upon others; and different kinds of interdependence, reproduction and survival. Prominent are plants and microbes that break things down, are eaten, and fulfil important roles in ecosystems—a mouldy jar, discarded cherry pits on a plate, fungus on a damp log, not shown as specimens or products but sensuous, living materials. 

Frankovich’s conceptualisation of “wild disorder”4 has been influenced by queer theorists such as Jack Halberstam. For Halberstsam, the categories of nature and wildness—often used to refer to that outside of the human, and which have been weaponised to further colonial, white supremicist and hetero-patriarchal agendas—still hold promise within an “untamed ecology” that disrupts an established order of things.5 Throughout the installation, we are reminded of the inherent strangeness and spectrum of bodies in the natural world, and how little we sometimes know of them. On one panel is a screenshot of a browser window open to the New York Times with the headline, “How the ‘Wandering Meatloaf’ Got its Rock-Hard Teeth.”6 The article refers to Gumboot Chiton, a mollusk with teeth made from a rare, iron-based mineral never seen elsewhere in the body of a living animal. Another panel features x-rays of a human skull, not with anything else that is recognisably ‘human’ but with closeups of an ant’s eye, a flower in bloom, what looks like bacteria growing in a petri dish, and other unknown subjects. Similar colours and textures abstract and confuse a sense of scale and separateness. By never providing a full, contextual view within the installation, the artist makes familiar things stranger, wilder, and undermines the notion of contained and knowable subjects in the world.

It is from these overlapping contexts that Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies questions the borders of the individual and poses other ways of thinking about the world, and the knowledge it contains, as an ecology. Warburg’s project, which attempted to animate Western cultural memory through images of pathos, not only serves as a template or grammar for organising and reading these images, but a kind of screen grab of what the present feels like. Warburg named his atlas after Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, who gave birth to The Muses—the goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. He attempted to create a technology or instrument to capture the pulse and expressive values of life articulated through these disciplines, each of which now find themselves in varied states of crisis and undoing. Frankovich’s installation, with its sublime textures and unfolding rhythms of life, has a particularly intense hum as we grapple with consumption, climate destruction and virus/disease/spread. If the categories and systems humans have used to define themselves are in a necessary state of upheaval, her installation revels in the question of how to live and work within this new, unstable subject position, much like the northern land snails known as Pūpūrangi, Paryphanta.



  1. The Warburg Institute, University of Cornell Library.  
  2. In 2020, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin staged an exhibition of the Mnemosyne Atlas. All sixty-three panels have now also been digitised and are viewable online. 
  3. Emilie Rākete, “In Human—Parasites, Posthumanism, Papatūānuku” in Documenta 14 Reader, eds. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Documenta, 2017).
  4. As described in the exhibition text. 
  5. See Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2020).
  6. “How the ‘Wandering Meatloaf’ Got its Rock-Hard Teeth”, The New York Times, 31 May 2021.



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