Roberta Trentin
The impact of human activities on nature generates an intertwined world, in which art has
become an anthropology of global life, connecting humans and nonhumans.
- Nicolas Bourriaud
EXTRACTOCENE 2022
Since the dawn of the industrial era, extractive practices have drastically transformed our
environment and caused habitat loss and degradation that directly impacted biodiversity.
EXTRACTOCENE is an offer to look at this highly criticized human era more specifically; it
pays attention to the landscape and the entanglements of our species with the wealth of what
lives around us. The loss of biodiversity acts like a detangling machine that is impossible to
ignore. With this work we turned to fungi to try to engage with narratives that are less extractive
and more regenerative. What can fungi teach us about reciprocity in sharing natural resources?
How can we pause the frantic disconnection of extractive living and welcome regenerative
thinking, fertile communications, thriving biodiversity, and practices? They are regenerative in
that we give importance more to the questions we ask than the answers and solutions we seek.
We might never have the (right) answers; what we will have left is all the adaptations we have
made along the way.