A Planet of Chickens. Future Fossils and Future Memory in the Anthropocene.

Each year, 65 billion chickens are killed and deboned across the world. As the materiality of the earth shifts under the weight of exhaustive human activity, fossilised chicken bones enter the planet’s strata (Bennett et al., 2018) by way of industrial-scale poultry farming. The proposed paper examines chicken bones as future fossils to conceptualise future memory in the Anthropocene. Drawing from the art initiative Pink Chicken Project by Nonsense Nonhuman proposing to genetically change the colour of the modern chicken (Gallus gallus Domesticus) to pink, the aim is to survey a future ‘inhuman’ memory containing in itself the disorder of the present and the failures of the past to anticipate a future collapse. Following Greg Garrard’s ‘future perfect subjunctive’ (2016), which looks back at a future lost, the temporal nexus of this paper is situated between memory of the past and future ‘proleptic’ memory (Colebrook, 2016). The inhuman is here invoked to interrogate the ‘we’ of the Anthropocene as well as its inherent anthropocentrism. The figure of the inhuman is singled out to examine processes of exploitation, subjection and othering which are intimately tied to anthropocentric, capitalist and colonial histories (Yusoff, 2019). Inhuman memory, in its relationality and multiplicity, then contains in itself the negation and inclusion of the human, and perhaps the promises of anthropocenic multispecies co-existences (Tsing 2015, Haraway, 2016). The paper proposes to investigate this by using the Anthropocene as a fluid reality as well as a filter to recognise and conceptualise planetary memory and future memory, and outline the possibilities of a more-than-human futurity.