A Coffee Talk, Steven tells me, is a talk around coffee. I would never bring coffee to a coffee talk, he says. And yet a few members of the staff, invited to a special performance by the dancer Dorte Jensen and the anthropologist Joe Dumit, did smuggle a latte in a paper cup. Joe gave a short introduction to the fifteen people who joined that morning. It’s a very quiet and nice occasion for the staff to go deeper into the material. Some of them are from the tour guide teams, others are from the administrative staff — all are very happy to share a moment.
After Joe and Dorte give them a short score (“an invitation” to explore something in a way that you wouldn’t have otherwise, says Joe), the staff members disperse in pairs.
They share each other’s perspective, one after the other, taking the time, slowing down to notice things differently, “at the speed of their attention.” The more you look, the more you see, as Joe likes to quote from his mentor Donna Haraway.
The giant kaleidoscope makes for a majestic immersion into a strange world. Sometimes, as a child, I had dreams about buildings in which doors opened to impossibly giant spaces. That is what happens when one looks up into one of Eliasson’s perception-altering machines. In that one, which spreads a strong orange light on the people sitting and lying on the floor, a helium balloon in a plastic bag is animated by a set of air streams from the sides. As a goul, it moves around, demultiplicated, on the surface of an evil beehive planet.
Fun times! I lay down under one of the kaleidoscopes and take a picture from below. In a typical “disordered attention” mode, people draw their phones to share the experience on social media. Pairs of visitors engage in discussions, more or less intriguing, about what they think of the work, about media, about meditation, about what they are curious about that day.
That evening is concluded by a talk hosted by the Council for Environmental Strategy of the museum: a lively conversation between the anthropologist Joe Dumit and the microbiologist of lichen Thorsten Lumbsch - who published his first paper at 15 (!). The discussion is led by a local biology activity obsessed by the Gaia theory — the microbiologist is very polite and declines to comment. Lichen are conversations, they are lifestyles, they are many things we didn’t think they were a few decades ago. We don’t know so much about them because only a few hundred biologists are invested in knowing more about them. But Joe is collecting the bits and pieces of the most curious and adventurous of them, the ones that are willing to let go of what they thought they knew about biology to account for these slow, very slow forms of life. Some of them grow 1mm in a decade. The oldest of them is 9000 years old. And they can go in space without a suit — they just need to be dry for that. They spend their lives drying and activating again when the weather is up for it. They are a slow party between different beings, Joe suggests, building on the evidence. And at the places where they meet and invited each other to the niches they create, they engage in supportive napping — the biologist didn’t deny that. There is so much we don’t know about lichen, indeed.
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