Mark Dorf
Works, Bio/CV, ContactNewsletter
kin
Artist Book
Published: September 2018
Publisher: Silent Face Projects
Size: 8.5″x5.75″, 8 pages
Binding: Hard Cover, Cardboard Book
Edition: 100
ISBN: 978-1-7326870-0-4
PURCHASE
kin is an artist book published by Silent Face Projects that explores the limits of the human perspective and the paradoxes inherent in the desire to move beyond it. Anchored by the final paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book opens with both the original text and a reworking by the artist—an attempt to shift away from a humanist framing toward one grounded in co-emergence and reciprocity. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin,” the revised text resists the narrative of a hierarchical “war of nature,” instead proposing a vision of entanglement among human and more-than-human worlds.
Yet even as it gestures toward a more inclusive perspective, the new text inevitably reveals the impossibility of fully escaping the human gaze. Its language, structure, and underlying logic remain tethered to the very frameworks it seeks to displace. In this way, kin becomes a meditation on the contradictions of reimagining our place in the world—an effort to write from the margins of a perspective that cannot be left behind.
Thus, from this shared matter, from exchange and cohabitation,
there is no proposition of most exalted object or subject,
for the perspective of matter in its many combinations leads.
There is grandeur in this view of emergence,
with its infinite powers,
having been breathed into all forms;
and that, whilst space has gone churning on without repeat,
abiding by no predictable pattern,
from so complex a spectrum,
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been,
and are becoming,
kin.
there is no proposition of most exalted object or subject,
for the perspective of matter in its many combinations leads.
There is grandeur in this view of emergence,
with its infinite powers,
having been breathed into all forms;
and that, whilst space has gone churning on without repeat,
abiding by no predictable pattern,
from so complex a spectrum,
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been,
and are becoming,
kin.
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death,
the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving,
namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
There is grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers,
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning,
endless forms moot beautiful and most wonderful
have been,
and are being,
evolved.
the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving,
namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
There is grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers,
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning,
endless forms moot beautiful and most wonderful
have been,
and are being,
evolved.