Nadja Bournonville - A worm crossed the street

With 'A worm crossed the street', Nadja Bournonville takes us into the archives of Vienna's Natural History Museum, the shelves of which are filled with animals transformed into dermoplastic exhibits, skeletons and wet preparations, for the most part bent and faded. Preserved in ethanol, once treated with arsenic, they are under continual scrutiny for insect infestations. These archived animals are now a mere shadow not only of their former selves, but often of their entire species. Research here is driven by the sorting, categorising and classifying of these objects in order to construct a systematic taxonomy of the animal kingdom. But how does our relationship to the specimens at the museum as representatives of their species change in an age of declining biodiversity? With each species that becomes extinct, its genetic information is irrevocably lost, and the process of disappearance is irreversible. Preservation, photographs, and digital reanimations cannot halt that process, but merely accompany it, and follow the traces of what has disappeared. The 377 black-and-white photographs in the book also reference Inger Christensen's poem Alphabet, laid out in accordance with the Fibonacci sequence, with excerpts here accompanying the photographs.