Mo Ganji: Human | Mensch | Homo sapiens | No. 098/250 from work group 8/99

Mo Ganji’s single line turns inward to the Human — a self-reflective primate shaped by language, memory and abstraction — through the same act of reduction applied to all other beings in this series. The continuous line offers only a minimal contour, enough to suggest a presence without anchoring it to identity, role or hierarchy. In this restraint, the human appears not as measure or exception, but as one form among others, encountered before concept claims dominance.

Homo sapiens is not assessed on the IUCN Red List, yet its ecological impact exceeds that of any other species. Through expansion, extraction and large-scale transformation of land, water and climate systems, humans have become a primary driver of biodiversity loss, habitat degradation and global environmental change. At the same time, human survival remains entirely dependent on the stability of the very systems being altered.

The defining pressures associated with humans are not threats to their own persistence as a species, but to the countless forms of life with which they share the planet. The capacity for foresight, ethics and responsibility stands alongside tendencies toward separation, domination and abstraction — a tension that continues to shape the living world.

Ganji’s single line allows the human to be encountered without centrality or privilege. It invites recognition of the human as part of nature rather than its counterpart, reminding us that the belief in standing outside or above life is itself a concept — one that obscures a more fundamental truth: that humans, too, are a fragile expression within the same continuous web of being they so profoundly affect.