K Allado-McDowell: The Known Lost
May 07 - Sep 07 2025
Swiss Institute (SI) is pleased to present The Known Lost, the first exhibition of the work of writer, artist, and musician K Allado-McDowell. Featuring a stage set composed of theatrical backdrops, a platform and a microphone, the exhibition is a rehearsal and performance space for Act I of an opera by Allado-McDowell with the same title. The gallery scenography depicts a proposed monument, which will be made to recognize and honor all species that have lived and gone extinct on Earth.
Presented in the lower-level gallery, the monument is rendered in a graphic style, reminiscent of early 20th century European Spiritualist painting, across seven cloth backdrops. In the center, a platform hosts a set of books, which contains a list of the scientific names of the 180,285 known extinct species from all kingdoms that Allado-McDowell has compiled from paleobiology databases. This list functions as the libretto of the opera and as the names to be engraved into the monument. While the list acknowledges and celebrates life, it also frames life as ephemeral. Visitors are invited to read or sing the names of the species over an original score by composer Derrick Skye. In doing so, they collectively rehearse and perform the first act of the opera, realizing the monument in the collective imagination – a foundational step towards its eventual construction.
Like a gravestone marker, the monument is a testament to the known lost species, whose names will cover the walls of an abandoned quarry, further marking the impermanence of their lives in stone for posterity. Allado-McDowell’s monument is designed to preserve knowledge of the biosphere’s history and act as a Rosetta Stone and site for reflection and pilgrimage for thousands of years. The names will be carved in a font by type designer Jeremy Mickel that uses dead alphabets and animal-inspired letterforms to indicate important information about each species, such as to which family it belongs and when it appears in the fossil record. Like the list of species, the quarry is a combination of natural and human-made absence. It is also a sublime and overwhelming byproduct of industrial activity, an accidental work of art, and a decimated site of capitalist extraction. Extinction is a biospheric process that necessarily leads to adaptation. The site might similarly enact renewal, restoration, or reimagination of the Anthropocene landscape.
There is a wealth of knowledge regarding the ongoing human- and capital-driven extinction event, known as the sixth mass extinction, yet there is so much that remains unknown. As species continue to go extinct, their names will be added to the monument in a recurring ritual performance designed to continuously honor life on Earth. Projected into the stage set version of The Known Lost monument at SI, visitors will wander the metaphoric terraces of the quarry, reading a seemingly endless ledger of lost species names. Its caverns will host the sounds of the opera — amidst other products of interspecies relationships — in an attempt to break the human-centric gaze inherent in our systems and technologies, reorient ourselves in a larger biospheric and ancestral frame, and face the incalculable loss that is yet to come.