Installation at Anticipation Festivalu 2024, La Gaîté Lyrique, Pariz,  photo. Fannie Plessis

What happens when the consequences of human actions are so pervasive and profound that everything on Earth becomes artificial to some degree?

From 29 October to 19 November, we’ll be hosting A Bestiary of the Anthropocene, an exhibition by Paris-based art and research collective Disnovation.org at Filodrammatica Gallery, which takes this very question as its starting point. The exhibition opens on Thursday, 29 October at 8 pm.

Gallery opening hours:
Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. | 5 – 8 p.m.
Saturday 5 – 8 p.m.
– closed on Sundays and public holidays

We have previously presented Disnovation.org’s work to Rijeka audiences as part of the group exhibitions The World Without Us (2017) and The Sea is Glowing (2020). This time, they return for their first solo exhibition in Rijeka. Before the opening, the collective’s founders, Maria Roszkowska (PL/FR) and Nicolas Maigret (FR), will talk about the exhibition and their work. The conversation will take place on Thursday, 29 October at 7 pm in the main hall of Filodrammatica.

 Installation at Of The Earth exhibition, Diriyah Art Futures, Saudi Arabia, 2025, photo: Disnovation.org

The exhibition is based on the 2021 book A Bestiary of the Anthropocene, an illustrated compilation of hybrid creatures of our time, equally inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet. Designed as a field handbook, it aims to help us observe, navigate, and orient ourselves in the increasingly artificial fabric of the world.

Plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, fordite, artificial grass, antenna trees, Sars-Covid-2, decapitated mountains, drone-fighting eagles, standardized bananas… each of these specimens is symptomatic of the rapidly transforming “post-natural” era we live in. Often, without us even noticing them, these creatures exponentially spread and co-exist with us.

A Bestiary of the Anthropocene seeks to capture this precise moment when the biosphere and technosphere merge and mesh into one new hybrid body. What happens when technologies and their unintended consequences become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to define what is “natural” or not? What does it mean to live in a hybrid environment made of organic and synthetic matter? What new specimens are currently populating our planet at the beginning of the 21st century?

A Bestiary of the Anthropocene at Le Cube, France, 2023, photo: Axel Fried / LeCube

A 20-minute video essay explores the most iconic specimens from the book, combining video footage from around the world. This two-channel video exposes the hybrid beings with which humans are now coexisting in the Anthropocene era, merging the natural and the artificial in various forms and degrees.

Co-commissioned by the Max Ernst Museum and Diriyah Art Futures, the video work is presented alongside a large-scale installation featuring a collection of physical specimens.

Detail from the exhibition at MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhowen, 2023, photo: Boudewijn Bollmann

DISNOVATION.ORG

A BESTIARY OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

☛ Filodrammatica Gallery, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka

29 October – 19 November, 2026

 
ARTIST TALK:
Thursday, 29 October, 7 PM

EXHIBITION OPENING:
Thursday, 29 October, 8 PM

GALLERY OPENING HOURS:
Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. | 5 – 8 p.m.
Saturday 5 – 8 p.m.
(closed on Sundays and public holidays; contact us to arrange another time of your visit)

DISNOVATION.ORG

→ https://disnovation.org/