Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

Extinction Silences

Extinction Silences is an experimental, participatory project exploring environmental engagement through the lens of colonial histories.

Collaborating with young people, Bristol communities and creative practitioners, its focus is how global wildlife extinction is presented through the museum’s traditional taxidermy displays. 

This work involves considering colonial silences – from the animals as beings, to their colonial histories, Indigenous knowledges and local communities. Why do these matter to how people think and act against global wildlife extinction? How could they be openly explored, and what new possibilities does this bring?

We’re collaborating with Rising Arts Agency, who empower Bristol’s underrepresented young people to fulfil their creative ambitions and to effect wider social change through the arts, and consultants from their community.

We are also working with Community Centred Knowledge to develop our staff processes of care when working with colonial collections and impacted communities.

Extinction Silences is a purposefully slow project – to give space for reflection, experimentation and conversation. After a first phase of developing ideas, a second phase will commission a small series of creative interpretations and test these with visitors. We hope to inform how the gallery develops over the longer term into a responsive and relevant contemporary space. 

Bristol Museums & Archives’ significant global collections may support new ways of engaging. For example, photographs and film in the British Empire & Commonwealth collection vividly highlight colonial backdrops such as extractive industry, hunting and safari. Collections of non-European material culture offer opportunities to connect with diverse knowledge practices or consider entwined cultural and ecological harms.

The ideas behind Extinction Silences are based on learning from a 2019 intervention called Extinction Voices. This showed the power of low-cost creative shifts and a participatory approach, but also brought focus on unspoken colonial histories in the space. 

‘Extinction Silences: exploring legacies of colonial violence and new ecological possibilities’ is a two-year project (2022-24) funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, delivered by the Museums Association.

For more information, please contact Isla Gladstone, Senior Curator Natural Science, Bristol Museums, via isla.gladstone@bristol.gov.uk.