(or the Manifesto for Reflective Coexistence and Solidarity with Non-Human Beings)
“When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?” - Michel de Montaigne
One day walking across his field in central Poland, my father found a strange looking rock. He showed it to me, laughing out loud. I felt immediately drawn to the bizarre stone. In Japan people believe that strange looking natural formations have souls. I was curious about the soul of the rock.
After consulting the scientists at the local university, the ‘stone’ turned out to be an over 200-million-year old fossil of a coral that grew in the shallow tropical waters of the Thetys Ocean that covered the whole area where my family home (and the rest of Europe) is located today. Almost as if I had suddenly found a long lost relative, I felt an immediate bond with my new, yet ancient, non-human friend. Who was the land owner in this context, and who was the guest? And what was my life from the point of view of a 200-million-year old being?
Me and the Coral created this project together, as a kind of Inter-Species Manifesto, announcing and exploring our close and intimate human-non-human bond: across time, space and species divides. Me - providing the surprisingly brief temporality of movement in space and the speculations of ongoing thought processes; the Coral - supplying the intuitive force of ages, grounding me in a freshly ancient time perspective.
Together we stand for the pan-species communication and symbiosis. It is no longer enough to simply care about oneself. We are both, what philosopher Timothy Morton calls, 'the Symbiotic Real' of our worldly dwelling: together we create a situation in which it’s not quite clear who is host and who parasite.
In the face of Deep Time, the established anthropocentric hierarchies begin to crumble. Our duration will be outlived by many non-human creatures. Maybe it's not too late to make friends with beings that we are co-creating this planet with?