Transcript

Friends, 

Glad to meet you.
And you too.
And you there.
And then all seven billion
and one of you.

Cordial greetings!

We the people are all the custodians of claims to the future.

We gather them, maintain them, mend them when they tear or break, release them into the universe when the time is right. 

Just the other day, we did some counting, and it might interest you to know that in 2019 we lost the Sumatran Rhino, the Chinese paddlefish, Yangtze giant softshell turtle, Indian cheetah, Spix’s macaw, Catarina Pupfish, and the Indochinese tiger.

In 2020, we lost the splendid poison frog, smooth handfish, Jalpa false brook salamander, spined dwarf mantis, and the Bonin pipistrelle bat.

Today we address you with an urgency to save our time from becoming the cost of business.

Cost of business is not the cost to do business.

Cost to do business is what goes on the ledgers. It orders itself to fuel everyone, and turns everyone into fuel. It tends to permeate the inner life of our planet’s dominant species. It is built on an aggregate of schooling and training. It works manuals of production and exhaustion. It plays out chaos, intoxications, hungers, doubts, arrogances, insanities, panics, expectations, and envies.

It is an obsessive delirium obstructing the sideways glance, leaving little pause for a calmness to look at the cost of the busy-ness.

Cost to do business needs the continuous extraction of millions of years of buried worlds. We are now eating time. Or let us say, time is eating us. We are eating the time that is eating us. And that is the news.

In this news, if you read between the lines we can sense that there is a cost of business. It is often a mere shrug in boardrooms.

This cost of business is an extinguishing machine.

It is learned the hard way, with heat, dust, storms, floods, and hurricanes. This is working on all species at a rate much faster than evolution can cope with.

It looks like in 2021, we’re about to lose the golden bamboo lemur, European hamster, five remaining species of riverine dolphins—the Amazonian Pink, the South Asian and the Irrawaddy, the Yangtze Finless Porpoises—the North Atlantic right whale, and the northern white rhinoceros and Tapanuli orangutan.

It is not as if extinction does not happen naturally. Nature is not sentimentally attached to the life forms that emanate from it. Nature’s grand indifference to the question of the survival of individual species has a cruel and ruthless beauty. But this indifference to the fate of one living thing is not an indifference to life itself.

Looking at the fossil record, we get a sense of what that natural extinction rate might be. It works out to about one species for every million species per year. Conservative estimates account for the existence of eight million species on the planet right now. The accelerating extinction of life in the last hundred years—purely as a result of one species, that is, us—adds up to a rate of extinction that can vary between one-thousand and ten-thousand times what it would be if natural processes were to play out unhindered.

There is an urgency to save our time from becoming the cost of business.

This is what the cost of business of the domination of one species over all the others in the last one hundred years has come to mean. That is not unsentimental indifference. That is an expensive, all-consuming addiction to extinction. To sustain this habit, our cultures rely on a spiral of extraction. We extract substances to build resources to protect ourselves from the consequences of extraction. That’s the server room air-conditioning Freon snake biting its global warming tale, skewing things such that it actually gets hotter when you desperately want it to get cooler.

It orders itself to fuel everyone, and turns everyone into fuel.

And this costly species—us—is not outside nature. We're not outside nature in the same way as a virus that acts as a predator on its host, is both an insider and an outsider to the host. The question of whether it becomes a part of the host it engages with is a function of the permeability of the cell wall, and the strength of its antibodies. As cell walls soften to the persistence and pummeling of virus, as the potency of antibodies weakens, the outside and inside of a life form become abstractions.

We are inside and outside. We are hosts, we are guests, we are predator and prey. We are feeders and food all at the same time. That is the history of our relationship to the world in one sentence. But that relationship has now outstripped the restraints of evolution.

Eventually, the success of virality is also its failure.

If the virus kills too much of the host population too quickly, it will have nothing left to feed on. This will mean the death of the virus species. That is why the evolution of viruses tends to be towards decreasing toxicity, so that the taut balance between predators and prey can remain in a state of dynamic equilibrium. We have to think carefully about how to calibrate our toxicity if we want to have a future. And if the future is to have us wanting a future, the cold, beautiful eye of natural indifference to the failure or success of particular species may turn to behold us in its uncaring gaze.

At this indifference to the fate of a living thing is not an indifference to life itself.

The interval between 2019 and 2021. In that time, the world also lost the last continuous fluent speakers of several languages. The Bering dialect of Aleut. the Juma, the Tuscarora, the Aka-Cari, the Ngandi, and the Tehuelche. In all, we have lost at least sixty-six languages in the twenty years since the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Imagine for a moment that you are an insurance agent and that you are calculating what it will take to amortize the debt we owe to our world, and to time. What will we have to put aside each year to compensate for the loss of a species or a language?

The last speaker of a language is the tail end of a fragile repository of all the words it takes to say something about life, the world, and the universe. When that form of living dies, the words, and its worlds, disintegrate into nothing.

It takes many thousands of years for a language to take shape. And only a short while to shut-eye. And die.

What is the value that would be placed on each word, or on each strand of the last living DNA of a lost life form?

From now onwards, with each passing year, this calculation will only keep enlarging. We are now eating time—or let us say, time is eating us.

Someone in some school somewhere will ask her teacher: How and when did extinction begin to become a rule, and not an exception? And another will add: How can life be lived the other way round? 

We will leave you with that. And you can take this forward. Or you could start again from scratch.

We wish you all well, notwithstanding.
It is true, it is incorrect to finish any sentence that says, notwithstanding.
That’s one of the traditions of our presidency, notwithstanding.

We are not withstanding the consequences of all the costs and the calculations, notwithstanding.

Look at the time. It’s time for us to go, notwithstanding.

“There is an urgency to save our time from becoming the cost of business.”

Raqs Media Collective’s trio-logue binds economics to climate change, extinction, and extractivism. They stress the externalized costs of our accepted capitalist logics: including extreme weather, species extinction, and language loss. In content and form, the Collective wryly critique the “rationality” of economic thinking, shedding light on its many casualties.

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 in Delhi, India. The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, and being in a state of revolution. Raqs Media Collective take this sense to mean “kinetic contemplation” and a restless entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs enlists objects such as an early-modern tiger-automata from Southern India, or a biscuit from the Paris Commune, or a cup salvaged from an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck, to turn them into devices to sniff and taste time. Devices and modalities are also played with to undertake historical subterfuge and philosophical query. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation.

The members of Raqs Media Collective live and work in Delhi, India. In 2001, they co-founded the Sarai program at CSDS New Delhi and ran it for a decade, where they also edited the Sarai Reader series. Raqs’ work has been shown in museums and exhibitions across the world, including Documenta 11; the Venice, Istanbul, Sydney, Shanghai and Sao Paulo Biennales; and solo exhibitions and projects at the National Gallery of Modern Art (Delhi), Tate Modern (London), UNAM (Mexico City), Fundacion Proa (Buenos Aires), Whitworth Gallery (Manchester), K-21 (Dusseldorf), and Mathaf (Doha), amongst others.

Curated exhibitions by Raqs include The Rest of Now (Manifesta 8, 2011), Sarai Reader 09 (Devi Art Foundation, Gurugram, 2012), Insert2014 (IGNCA, Delhi, 2014), Why Not Ask Again (Shanghai Biennale, 2016), In the Open or in Stealth (MACBA, Barcelona, 2018), Five Million Incidents (Goethe Institut, Delhi & Kolkata, 2019-2020) and Afterglow (Yokohama Triennale, 2020).

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