The Guardian View on our history with David Pantaloch and herds: a new theater of the Anthropocene | Editorial
AThe United Kingdom’s parts of S this week brought even more alarming reports to increasing temperatures, extreme weather events and a drop in the chances of reaching the global objective of 1.5C. It was the warmest spring in the United Kingdom and it is the driest in more than 50 years.
Communicating the urgency of our difficult situation without causing despair and despair is an insoluble challenge, especially with regard to children. But two theatrical experiences with trail lines cause the rupture of the natural world in urban metropolitan areas and the increase in the alarm with such immediacy than even those of us quite happy to live in places that have so far been relatively unchanged by the climate crisis must pay attention.
Our story with David Attentborough is an immersive story of 50 minutes breathless on the planet, from the team behind the recent Film Ocean. Thanks to 24 projectors and 50 speakers, the Jerwood gallery of the Natural History Museum is transformed into a solar system, prehistoric caves, ocean and jungle. As in the classic of the children of Maurice Sendak where wild things are: “The walls [become] The world all around ”. We swim with the whales and we are found face to face with gorillas – as Sir David did in life on Earth in 1979. We are looking at space: like the winning novel of last year, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, our history inspires feelings of printing and protection towards our planet that astronauts call “the effect of visibility”.
In the past, Sir David has been accused of not speaking strongly enough about the ecological disaster of human manufacture. But the writer Guardian George Monbiot, formerly one of his most ferocious criticisms, described Ocean, released for the 99th anniversary of Sir David this year, like the film “I waited all my professional life”. In our history, we travel through the mass extinctions of the past and, specically, in the future. Without a change, “the perspective of the following generations is dark”, is warned the public.
Next Friday, hundreds of life elephants, giraffes, gazelles and animal puppets of all kinds will cross the streets of London in their 20,000 km trip from Central Africa to the Arctic Circle. The herds are the follow -up of The Walk. In 2021, a 12-foot puppet girl, Little Amal, traveled from the border of Turkey-syria in London, to raise awareness of the refugee crisis. Little Amal has reached 2 million people in 17 countries. Now, its creators hope to do the same for the climate emergency. While the herd fled north, it will be joined by puppets of native species from each country it visits. Manchester is his next destination, before continuing in Scandinavia.
The artistic director of the project, Amir Nizar Zuabi, has recognized that all these efforts, as ambitious, are only “water flows on a stone”. But, as he says, over time, enough drops can reshape a stone.
These are visceral and sensory immersions. Like Olafur Eliasson’s climate art installation The Weather Project At Tate Modern in 2003, these spectacular invites us to think together – these are collective experiences. This is the theater of the anthropocene: vast, cataclysmic, beautiful and yet ultimately full of hope too. They help us visualize what a different world might look like – if only politicians and businesses were made to act. The next chapter depends on us. As Sir David says at the end of our history, we must work towards a time when the earth becomes a planet “with not only an intelligent species, but also a wise”.
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