O’o: New exhibition about troubled nature opens in Amsterdam

The song of the Ao bird on Kauai Island in Hawaii calling for a mate is a plaintive minor tune.

The bird sings in vain. It was an introduced species prized by Europeans for its bright yellow feathers and its eggs, which were taken by cats and vermin that came with ships. The O’o species finally became extinct at the end of the last century, and a 1987 recording of the song of the last known male (no female can hear it) is part of a new exhibition in Amsterdam.

“There are four species of O’o on the island of Hawaii,” said curator Hans Mulder. “They are hunted by other animals, such as rats, which are brought by humans… The consequences are very serious.”

A new exhibition at the Allard Pierson Museum, part of the University of Amsterdam, shows the dramatic consequences of how Western Europeans have understood and interacted with nature over time.

He said that by featuring objects from Charles Darwin’s last letters alongside modern art by Damien Hirst, the exhibition was intended to provide food for thought and be “not radical but activating”.

One of the most striking mediums used by the exhibition is sound: the eager chirping of birds welcomes visitors to come in. Another exhibit shows the impact of cities on great tits in the Netherlands, which raise the pitch of their songs to mask human traffic in Leiden, perhaps making it harder for rural birders to identify them as the same species.

It’s all part of a larger message about how modern humans might choose to behave. “We don’t have to ‘save nature,’ but we need to understand that if we ourselves want to survive, we need to do our best to protect our ecosystems and, indeed, the entire planet,” Mulder said.

Chain of Being

Different rooms show different understandings of nature in Western Europe, from early ideas about the “scale of nature” or The Great Chain of Being the supremacy of humans over animals, and the colonial craze for collecting exotic objects.

The exhibition includes paintings by German biologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who published a book on insects in Suriname in 1705 – among them a new Just acquired Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.

Naming natural discoveries became another obsession of the 18th century^day The system was introduced by the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, who visited the Netherlands and exhibited it in a carefully dressed portrait – perhaps, in his own opinion, a typical example of one of his titles, “Homo sapiens”.

The exhibition tracks changes in the natural world, with habitats moving further up the mountains, species disappearing, and impacts throughout the food chain due to modern climate change. However, the exhibition ends with a message of “hope” and invites visitors to share their reactions.

Haunted

“I don’t know if you should look at this with guilt, but there are obviously things that were done in the past that we wouldn’t do again — the views of Aboriginal and local people on how to relate to nature are sometimes very different,” Mulder said. “We want to make people think.”

Else van der Plas, director of the Allard Pearson Museum, said the exhibition and the haunting call of the extinct ooo bird made their historical archive both relevant and compelling. “It’s a very beautiful sound,” she said simply.

this The Call of O’o: The exhibition “Nature Under Pressure” runs from August 30 to January 26, 2025