NETHERLANDS

94 Million Years of Collectivism, 2022. Video, 13 minutes 40 seconds.

Supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

94 Million Years of Collectivism is a newly commissioned video work by artist Jonas Staal, that explores the geological period from 635 to 541 million years ago known as the "Ediacaran." For 94 million years, complex organisms co-existed in the Ediacaran ecosystem, but without any predatory relationships between them. The Ediacaran is essentially a "collectivist" ecology, in which resources were shared, not extracted. In Staal's view, the reality of the Ediacaran fundamentally challenges the Neo-Darwinian narrative that capitalist predation forms the primal evolutionary drive. What we need instead is a

"proletgeology": a study of earth-memories of other-than-human proletarian and collectivist life-forms and ecosystems.

The field of Proletgeology is founded by proletgeologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Dei and paleoartist Jonas Staal.