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Earth-Space and Place: Reimagining Law and Place in the Earth-Space Complex Systems
Dec 9, 2024Tap to summarizeAs part of the More-Than-Planet program, Makery organized a conference in May 2023 on the links between the ocean and space and how artists explore these issues. On this occasion, we invited Elena Cirkovic, a Law researcher from the University of Helsinki and a Bioart Society member, to discuss ocean law and space law. This winter, Elena Cirkovic will publish “The Law of Complex Earth and Outer Space Systems, The Cosmolegal Proposal”, in which she proposes an exploration of the law-making paradigm for complex interactions between the Earth system and outer space in the Anthropocene era. Here are exclusive reading notes on the book to be published on March 4, 2025. The rapid expansion of human activities in outer space has created novel environmental challenges that transcend existing regulatory frameworks. As satellite mega-constellations proliferate and space debris accumulates, Earth-space technologies and accelerating activities impact Earth-space complex systems. These activities generate complex feedback loops and emergent phenomena affecting both orbital and terrestrial environments. Elena Cirkovic’s latest book, “The Law of Complex Earth and Outer Space Systems: The Cosmolegal Proposal”, introduces the concept of “Cosmolegality” as a theoretical framework for understanding the socio-political, technical, and ecological Earth-space interactions. Developed through the ANTARES project (Anthropocentrism and Sustainability of the Earth System and Outer Space, conducted and completed at the University of Helsinki and the Max Planck Institute for Procedural Law in Luxembourg), this approach argues for fundamental changes in how law, as a social system, conceptualises and addresses environmental challenges that span Earth and space environments. Elena positions her research at the intersection of environmental law, complex systems theory, and critical legal studies, while engaging with broader discussions in environmental humanities and Bio-art. By examining specific phenomena such as Arctic methane releases and orbital debris accumulation, her extensive and transdisciplinary study demonstrates how current legal frameworks fail to capture the complexity of Earth-space interactions. Earth-Space Complex Systems The book examines several key phenomena that demonstrate the complex connections between Earth’s systems and space activities. Arctic methane craters serve as a starting point. Initially, these phenomena appear unrelated. Methane craters emerge from complex processes involving permafrost thaw and trapped methane release. Their formation represents a dangerous feedback loop in the climate system, as methane is even more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Space technology plays a dual role in understanding and affecting these Earth system changes. Satellite monitoring systems, such as MethaneSAT and MERLIN, provide important data for tracking methane emissions and environmental changes. However, the effectiveness of these monitoring systems faces increasing challenges from orbital congestion and debris. The research demonstrates how space activities affect atmospheric processes through multiple pathways: direct pollution from launches and re-entries, modification of upper atmosphere chemistry, and long-term alterations to atmospheric composition. Recent findings from the 2024 European Space Research and Technology Centre workshop reveal that, inter alia, approximately 10% of particles in the stratosphere now contain spacecraft metals, demonstrating the increasing human impact on atmospheric composition at all levels. The full lifecycle of space technology, from manufacturing through launch to eventual re-entry, creates environmental impacts that cross traditional boundaries between Earth and space environments. These interactions challenge traditional legal frameworks in several ways. First, they demonstrate how environmental impacts transcend conventional jurisdictional boundaries. Second, they reveal the limitations of current regulatory approaches that treat Earth and space environments as separate domains. Finally, they highlight the need for legal frameworks that can address the complex, often unpredictable interactions between human activities and natural systems. The book argues for expanding our understanding of planetary boundaries to encompass orbital space, demonstrating how space activities affect all nine existing planetary boundaries. This analysis shows how seemingly separate phenomena—from Arctic methane releases to satellite operations—are, in fact, deeply interconnected through complex feedback mechanisms that span Earth and space environments. © Elena Cirkovic 2024 The Cosmolegal Proposal The concept of Cosmolegality proposes a transformation in how law approaches Earth-space interactions. The book develops this normative and theoretical concept through an analysis of both scientific evidence and legal theory, arguing that traditional legal frameworks are fundamentally inadequate for addressing contemporary environmental challenges. This approach extends existing arguments that law is a complex adaptive system. It draws on recent developments in complex systems science, particularly the research teams and work of 2021 Nobel Laureates Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi. Their research demonstrates how even seemingly simple systems can exhibit extraordinarily complex behaviour. The framework challenges traditional legal assumptions about causation, predictability, or stability of legal systems. While conventional environmental law often seeks to establish clear cause-and-effect relationships, Cosmolegality explicitly incorporates uncertainty as a fundamental characteristic rather than treating it as a problem to be solved and argues for the “complexification” of legal procedure (not as procedure itself, but re-imagining causality and causation, stability, and predictability). The book demonstrates this approach through several concrete examples. The May 2024 International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) Advisory Opinion on climate change provides a case study in how international law might evolve to address complex environmental challenges. The Opinion’s expansion of marine pollution definitions to include greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of source, suggests how legal frameworks can adapt to address systemic environmental challenges. © Elena Cirkovic 2024 Displaced Placemaking in Earth-Space Building on the theoretical foundations established in the book, Elena’s parallel artistic research project at the University of Lapland’s Faculty of Art and Design develops the concept of “displaced placemaking” through individual engagement with Earth-space environments. This work examines how experiences of displacement can generate unique perspectives on human-beyond planetary relationships that transcend traditional geopolitical boundaries and local identities. At Lake Kilpisjärvi Enontekiö, Finland (Kiruna, Sweden) and the Seurasaari museum in Helsinki, this research engages with multiple narratives of place and belonging. Elena positions her work at the intersection of local cultures (Sámi, Finnish, and migrant), experiences of multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously, and the beyond-human. The Seurasaari Museum was founded in 1909 and consists of 87 buildings from the different provinces of Finland. Relocated to Seurasaari Island, they are meant to show life in Finnish countryside from the 18th century to the 20th. This temporal framing of Finnish cultural heritage co-exists with deeper geological processes—the island’s emergence through post-glaci...
Transcribe →The Politics of Symbiosis
Dec 8, 2024Tap to summarizeThis spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. We discuss here the discovery, the different understandings and their political meanings of the symbiosis phenomenon through times. Under Carl von Linné and up until the 19th century, certain so-called lower animal species were still placed in a special category called “zoophytes” (etymologically, animal-plants). In his 1802 classification, Gottfried Treviranus distinguished two classes: the Zoophyta class, including corals, jellyfish, sea anemones, hydras, sea urchins and starfish; and the Phytozoa class for “plant-animals”, including fungi, lichens, moss, ferns and water plants, filamentous algae and fucus, and so on. Things gradually evolved in the 19th century. Christian Ehrenberg coined the word bacterium in 1838 [1], examined euglena, diatoms, radiolarians and identified corals. Henri Lacaze-Duthiers studied corals in Algeria and published a “natural history” of them in 1864 [2]. In 1865, Addison Verrill created the phylum of cnidarians (corals, anemones, jellyfish, etc). In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed the kingdom of protists to categorize unclassifiable species with both animal and plant characteristics. The description of these species already hinted at animal-plant symbiotic relationships, but it was the study of the dual fungus-algae nature of lichen [3] that really opened up new perspectives and established the vocabulary [4]. Several biologists went on to describe lichen: Heinrich Anton de Bary from the University of Halle in Germany, the Swiss Simon Schwendener [5], and the Russians Andrei Famintsyn and Ósip Baranetsky, who in 1867 succeeded in cultivating algae outside the thallus, or body, of the lichen [6]. But the relationship was initially understood in terms of parasitism, notably for Schwendener, for whom the fungus was a parasite of the algae and the lichen association “a community between a master fungus and a colony of slave algae that the fungus holds in perpetual captivity, in order to provide it with food” [7]. The notion was challenged, however, by De Bary, Famintsyn and Baranetsky, as well as by the Belgian zoologist Pierre-Joseph van Beneden, who in 1875 referred to other interspecific relationships as “commensalism” and “mutualism”: “The commensal does not live at the expense of its host in the sense that this dependence would create an unfavorable situation for the host, a diminution of its life, but it depends on it all the same to keep itself alive.” [8] The commensal “is received at his neighbor’s table” [9]. In 1877, Karl Möbius published in Berlin Die Austern und die Austernwirtschaft (The oyster and its industry), in which he introduced the term “biocenosis” in order to “account for all species living in the same environment” [10]. That same year, Albert-Bernhardt Frank, another lichen specialist from the University of Leipzig, proposed the word “symbiotismus” to move away from analysis centered on parasitism, which carried an anthropocentric bias: “Wherever there is a common internal or external habitat between two separate species, we need a broader term; whatever role the two partners play, we still don’t take it into account. In any case, we will base our observation on them simply ‘living together’, and this is why we can recommend designating these cases under the term symbiotismus.” [11] Finally in 1878, following Franck and in a now-famous presentation, De Bary proposed the general word “symbiosis” to describe different organisms living together [12]. As epistemologist Olivier Perru points out, “in defining symbiosis, the aim is neither to privilege mutualism nor to emphasize antagonism. Furthermore, unity aims for a common economy, which does not necessarily mean mutual benefit” [13]. Consociation It’s interesting to note that the use of the term symbiotic in the organization of social relations predates its use in the field of biology. Indeed, as Frédéric Lordon remarked in 2015 in his Imperium, Structures et affects des corps politiques [14], “symbiotic” appears as early as the 17th century in the work of jurist and political philosopher Johannes Althusius. As Lordon points out, Althusius is often mentioned as a precursor of confederalism or libertarian anarchism. In his Politica methodice digesta et exemplis sacris et profanis illustrata, published in 1603, this Calvinist trained in civil and ecclesiastical law in Basel considers that “before being subjects of any sovereign, individuals are ‘symbiotes’”. Lordon stresses that “it is the immanence of their common life that must be the starting point of all political thought,” referring us to works written a decade ago by Gaëlle Demelemestre, which helped disseminate Althusius’s thoughts in France [15]. In the first paragraph of his Politica, Althusius writes: “Politics is the art of establishing, cultivating and preserving among men the social life that must unite them. This is called symbiotics. The subject of politics is thus consociation [16], by intentional or tacit pact, by which symbionts reciprocally bind each other to the mutual communication of things that are useful and necessary for participating in social life. The objective of the symbiotic policy developed by mankind is sacred, just, appropriate and happy symbiosis, ensuring that nothing necessary or useful to life is missing.” [17] Note that Althusius’s Politica methodice digesta was published 40 years before British philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive (On the Citizen), which introduces the notion of bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all), based on the age-old motto of homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man [18]. So it seems that it was Hobbes’s image of man as inherently violent in his natural state, an individualist with an insatiable desire for power, that endured right up to the 19th century. This image informed the poet Lord Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw” [19], as well as Herbert Spencer’s [20] and Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”. Hobbes repeatedly proclaimed that he was the first to establish – with Leviathan in particular – an authentic and scientifically founded doctrine of human affairs, the first to make a science of morality and politics. We prefer Althusius, who before Hobbes described the human being as a “civil animal ardently aspiring to association”. For Althusius, symbiosis (living together) implies more than mere common existence; it “indicates a quality of mutual sharing and communication” [21] without which society is not possible. Stencil of Lynn Margulis. With her endosymiotic theory of evolution, Margulis opposed competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species. From symbiosis to mutual aid The expression “survival of the fittest” was first introduced by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology published in 1864, five years after Darwin’s Origin of Species. A rare best-selling author of his time, Spencer significantly contributed to developing a social Darwinism that paved the way for scientific racism. This reading of Darwinism had already been roundly mocked by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But in the late 1870s, when symbiosis theories were emerging, anarchist authors were keen to nurture a perspective of mutual aid between living beings to counter the conservative appropriation of Darwin’s theses. Such was the case of Elisée Reclus in Geneva, with his article “Evolution and Revolution” in Piotr Kropotkin’s journal Le Révolté in 1880, and of Emile Gautier with his pamphlet Social Darwinism [22], published in Paris the same year. For Gautier, the permanent “struggle for life” implied by the “law of natural selection” becomes less intense as social institutions develop. Mutual assistance and social solidarity are the motors of human progress, and constitute the true content of “social Darwinism”, much more than the struggle and victory of the “fittest”. In 1883, Gautier was sentenced to five years of prison alongside Kropotkin and others in the famous trial of the 66 anarchists in Lyon. After being released from prison in 1886, Kropotkin went to Edinburgh to meet the biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes – a close associate of Reclus and specialized in marine animal-algae symbioses, Roscoff worms, anemones and sea hydras, which he had studied under Lacaze-Duthiers. Geddes believed that natural selection was not the primary force of evolution, the result of survival of the fittest, but rather a brake on evolutionary tendencies, the pruning tool that enabled a better development of the plant or organism; he considered cooperation to be more important for the evolution of all life forms and saw the Earth as a cooperative planet [23]. Geddes inspired Kropotkin to write “Mutual aid among animals”, the first in a series of articles originally published between 1890 and 1896 in the British periodical The Nineteenth Century, exploring the role of cooperation and mutual aid in the animal kingdom and in human...
Transcribe →Feral Living through Poetic Immersion in the Satoyama
Nov 27, 2024Tap to summarizeThis spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. In this text, Leila Chakroun tells us about her experience in a satoyama, a Japanese mountain village, community-based and agroforestry, whose design and spatial and human organization are intimately linked to its natural environment. It’s 6:30 a.m. A Japanese voice crackles out of the loudspeakers, intermingling with the morning songs of cicadas and bush warblers, and with the metal clang of pots and pans in the kitchen. Sunlight warms the walls of the house, which had remained cool all night, thanks to an informed choice of materials: raw earth, bales of straw and charred wood. A dense forest of Japanese cypress (hinoki) invaded by bamboo surrounds the dwellings, leaving part of the rooms in shade. The smell of curry announces the start of breakfast. The small community, a sort of chosen family, sits down and chants a little prayer addressed to the Earth and earthly creatures, human and non-human, who together have made possible this savory blend of flavors and textures, being present here this morning, allowing our bodies to remain in motion. Almost everything is produced on site: vegetables, rice and spices (coriander, ginger, turmeric). Rapeseed oil and cheese were exchanged with a neighboring farm, located further down the valley, not far from a former metropolis, now depopulated. Each person speaks in turn, sketching out the plan for the day little by little. There is no fixed leader here, as we experiment with horizontal governance and fluid work management by temporary leaders. Today is the day we harvest the rice. In addition to planning the different stages, equipment and storage, we also need to organize our work to include the people from a neighboring village who will come to lend a helping hand. We experience this seasonal repetition of common gestures as a celebration of a way of life that is still possible, despite everything. Despite the demographic decline, where some houses no longer light up after nightfall. Despite the exhaustion from working on steep terrain and during increasingly frequent heatwaves, even in early autumn. Despite the large population of monkeys, wild boars and deer, with whom farmers must share the harvest, whether they like it or not. Despite the soil, which, even after being cultivated for decades using natural farming practices, still retains traces of toxic clouds and excessive chemical fertilizers. But each morning, the rural soundscape reminds us that it’s possible to resist and survive the cacophonic frenzy of the big cities. If rurality persists, it will surely be through perpetuated and reinvented “musical scores” of gestures [1]. Musical scores of common gestures and multispecies landscapes These multi-sensory and multi-species scores are at the heart of the Japanese philosophy of satoyama. The now-ecological term “satoyama” originally designated mixed landscapes, composed of small mountain village communities and the adjacent forest that they cultivated for subsistence. The Japanese concept 里山 is composed of the kanji 山 yama (mountain), and 里 sato (village). The play on words dates back to the 18th century Edo period, when the kanji for 山里 yamazato (mountain village) were inverted. Satoyama literally designates the mountain of the village, or perhaps more poetically, “the village mountain” – thus reversing the proprietary logic by subsuming the human settlement to the ecosystem that hosts it. It’s a forested mountain that lives through and with “its” humans. In a progressive semantic shift, satoyama now designates forested farmlands on the outskirts of villages in the mountains or countryside. The concept wasn’t a part of common Japanese vocabulary until the early 1960s, when it was proposed by Shidei Tsunahide, a forestry ecologist who wanted to give a name to these landscapes that he saw “silently” disappearing. Satoyama landscapes have been deeply affected by the social, territorial and economic dynamics that followed Japan’s modernization – beginning with the Meiji restoration in 1861, then even more dramatically after World War II. The nation became largely urban, structured around metropolises, to the point that today, 92% of Japan’s population of 126 million lives in cities (2024). With fewer people living in rural areas, there are also fewer farmers – only 2% of the working population is involved in agricultural production. This net loss of the workforce and of the community ties that once maintained satoyama is exacerbated by the lack of renewal and subsequent aging population of rural regions. The disintegration of satoyama highlights a particular understanding of agrarian and agroforestry landscapes, which diverges from the patrimonial and backward-looking vision that has underlain discourses on environmental protection. It is indeed the collapse of community dynamics and the absence of human residents that has accelerated the demise of these landscapes and many of the non-human creatures that populated them. Satoyama have become the symbol of a possible coexistence between humans and non-humans, in Japan and internationally2, the living proof of a terrestrial future that does not exclude humanity, but rather carries it through an ethos and praxis of care. Several studies have identified the biocenosis that constitutes the satoyama, i.e., the multi-species agroforestry community, which includes 350 species of trees and plants living in forests, rivers and fields, fungi such as the (too) much-loved matsutake, fish, frogs, ducks and herons, as well as small rodents and their predators (hawks, sparrowhawks) [3]. Today, satoyama stand to benefit not only from their traditional countryside esthetics – dense forest, village hamlet, terraced rice paddies – but as physical and territorialized manifestations of what some have called the “bioregional hypothesis”4. Etymologically, the bioregion refers to a “territory of life” – not only the place that we occupy during our lives, but a place that hosts various forms of life and interactions among them. These manifestations are buried in the interstices of territories, whose liminality allows room for experimentation and divergence. Satoyama can be seen as these interstices in a number of ways: they are located on the edges, far from major urban centers, intermingle the essences of plant and animal, forest and farm, thus blurring the boundaries between wild, cultivated and inhabited spaces. The abandonment of these landscapes and the lack of human intervention have only reinforced the fluidity of these boundaries. Currently in the process of being de-domesticated and re-wilded, satoyama have become living examples of feral life, which we must urgently learn to inhabit [5]. They teach us that, in the face of extractivism and desertification, becoming feral is the best thing that can happen to us, if not the only possible condition for our humanity. It is precisely because these socio-agro-ecosystemic dynamics are partially “liberated” from industrial farming practices and culturally dominant esthetic standards, that they support budding precious liminal spaces to imagine, collectively and corporeally, novel lifestyles and renewed connections with ourselves and with others, human and non-human. Becoming feral opens, even forces, new possibilities. As daily gestures are performed in a multi-species community [6], new landscapes emerge, and with them existential and political nourishment to subsist and resist within the entanglements and sympoieses of the Cthulucene [7]. In the shadows of these depopulated countrysides, we can see the light of other cosmologies. Toward a neo-peasant, agroecological, bioregional and multispecies future In Japan, satoyama have spearheaded a form of sustainability that embraces human existence, along with the landscapes that accompany it and give it meaning. Considering the plethora of actors, permaculture and natural agriculture movements are among the few to venture beyond the discourse of coexistence to truly experiment with possible ways of inhabiting these landscapes – by allowing themselves to transform them, and perhaps taint some of their romanticized clichés. In addition to re-inhabiting the spaces, these actors rehabilitate them through public events. In 2019, Permaculture Center Pamimomi and Satoken Association organized a public meeting under the slogan “Satoyama Repair” to discuss potential methods for repairing and caring for satoyama using permaculture design and natural farming techniques. Among the proposed social and ecological innovations was a workshop given by Pamimomi on their rice fields. The paddies are entirely cultivated – or precisely “not cultivated” (耕さない田んぼ tagayasanai tanbo) – according to Fukuoka Masanobu’s principles of non-action: the soil is not turned over or limed dry, no fertilizers or chemicals are applied, the rice grains come from the previous year’s harvests, transplanting is done by hand, sub...
Transcribe →Building the archipelagos of the future at Island School of Social Autonomy
Nov 13, 2024Tap to summarizeFrom the 4th to the 9th of October, 2024, ISSA (Island School of Social Autonomy) facilitated a collective building action and series of lectures, workshops, and discussions in Vis, guided by the central theme of To Live Together. The aim was to build new ways of “being, living, and learning together beyond the ruins of capitalism” and provide an embodied “platform for contemplating a different world.” A community has been brewing on the island of Vis, one of the most distant islands in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of southern Croatia. The Island School of Social Autonomy or ISSA, located above the village of Komiža on the western part of the island, is a recently formed organism. Spearheaded by the Croatian philosopher Srečko Horvat, it is a sprawling community of mostly Balkan artists and activists who collectively bought and are working on restoring three hectares of desolate land and previously uninhabited mountainous green terrain. ISSA is an old stone house, a small construction site, a group of friends, an extended community, and a network. Before I attended the ISSA To Live Together conference, I was talking with a few friends about going. Some of them knew about it because of the involvement of the Italian philosopher, Franco Bifo Berardi. Some knew about it through the grapevine, and some knew about it because Pamela Anderson is listed as a donor on the website. One acquaintance laughed and said; “The School of Social Autonomy? Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?” Later on the ferry ride, as I watched the sun dip into the sea and felt the mainland retreating behind my back, his question stuck in my head. Credit: Matteo Principi The school in the name of Island School of Social Autotnomy is not glided over, nor is it a stand-in word to represent the conference-type structure of the program. It is an integral part of ISSA’s ideological positioning inspired by Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society (1971) and his claim that the contemporary educational system has turned into an “advertising agency that makes you believe that you need the society as it is”. The notion of social autonomy is not divorced from the notion of pedagogy, and learning with and from each other. According to Paulo Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the inspirations of ISSA, the learner is to be treated as a co-creator of knowledge. Many of the lecturers at the ‘conference’ are members of the ISSA organism, or have started their own similar, perhaps more private initiatives such as James Bridle, a British artist and writer who is based on an island in the Aegean Sea. The search for autonomy as a political strategy and a model for social organization is a recurring idea at ISSA. It is closely linked with the nature of islands as isolated and hermetic spaces, spaces where people inscribe their desires and grow them patiently, in the process integrating with the existing topology. ISSA’s location is thus both a geographic and metaphorical stance: “We believe that the future lies in archipelagos of autonomy.” The idea of self-management as a framework has been consistently present in the history of island schools nurturing subversive discourse and activity. ISSA in its current form gives a nod of respect to the summer school of Korčula, founded in the 1960s on a nearby island in the former federal state of Yugoslavia. The historic summer school and the journal it birthed, Praxis, a Marxist-humanist journal, was commemorated in the panel talk entitled The 60th Anniversary of Praxis, and included Nadežda Čačinovič, Boris Buden, Ankica Čakardić, and Mira Oklobdžija all of whom were directly involved in the Korčula summer school. The Korčula summer school encounters that took place during the 1960s were crucial meeting points for philosophers worldwide including Ernst Bloch, Jürgen Habermas, and Predrag Matvejević, bringing together social critics from the western and eastern blocs. Throughout the five days of ISSA and during this particular panel, a simmering need to continue and expand upon this tradition beyond the logic of identity and the hegemonic discourse on the past could be felt. The 60th Anniversary of Praxis. CC 4.0 by ISSA School / BONK productions School on the beach session. CC 4.0 by ISSA School / BONK productions As Boris Buden put it: “Dealing with the past makes sense only in the ability of us to take the past in our hands and affect the present.” The cultural heritage of Praxis proposed that these particular isolated spaces dedicated to critical thought towards existing infrastructures of property and social relations as well as simple collective leisure, took shape in ‘Dyonisian Socialism.’ Praxis and the Korčula summer school were informed by the idea that thinking must transcend the scope of academic institutions and nurture the singularity of multitudes rather than promoting a single monolithic school of thought: not a global revolution but many small local utopias. The ritual of meeting on the beaches in the late afternoon and drinking and talking was an important part of the Korčula summer school and was continued at ISSA, where initiatives such as Memory of the World, Chto Delat, Forest University, and Aventura presented their practices during the school on the beach sessions. Most of the two hundred participants that attended the current and second iteration of ISSA were activists, journalists, artists, and researchers working on parallel and often interlinked initiatives spanning multiple continents. Casual conversation merged with political critique and speculation ebbed and flowed with the waves. Although it was not specifically mentioned, I couldn’t help but return to the concept of the archipelago and Edouard Glissant’s theory of archipelagic thinking. The theory of archipelagic thinking originates from the violently colonized scattering of islands in the Carribean, and the dissident philosophical thinking produced there, an arguably different context than the briefly colonized island of Vis that retained its language. Nevertheless, there are similarities in archipelagic thinking, marked by unpredictability, multiplicity-in-oneness, and ambiguity. It calls for an “insurrection of the imaginary faculties” aspiring towards innovative ways of conceiving the world, and resonates in many of the conversations echoing across ISSA and the Praxis journal before it. Mira Oklobdžija, a panelist in the Praxis discussion, referred to a philosopher who had also reflected from the shores of an island: Aristotle and his definition of three forms of knowledge — theoria, poiesis, and praxis. She outlined some interesting digressions in the two generations of the Croatian summer schools, pointing out that ISSA is more activistic and anchored in praxis than the journal Praxis ever aspired to be. An audience member quipped that perhaps in ISSA, the poetry is precisely in the praxis, and this rings true to the guiding motto of ISSA; “We build the school, and the school builds us.” Two days of ISSA were dedicated to restoring and expanding the old stone building or school nestled in the Vis hills, which will constitute the main hub of ISSA activities. During the days of To Live Together, the regular working force (usually just a few people) at the construction site swelled to a hundred or more, and work that normally took months was accomplished in two days. We carried wooden planks up the mountain and sanded them to construct the large terrace, and participated in a workshop on how to build traditional, terraced stone walls, a practice called dry stonewalling. This technique is so essential on the islands of the Adriatic that it has been included as an UNESCO intangible heritage of mankind. The workshop was led by Igor Mataić, a doctor of science specializing in geotechnics and environmental engineering who is also part of the Pomalo association, a cultural and action-based initiatives NGO on Vis dedicated to protecting the natural environment and sustainable life on the island. We learned where to place the larger anchoring boulders and how to fill in the gaps with smaller stones, making a type of wedge in the sloped side of the hill. The technique doesn’t need any adhesive or cement but relies on viney vegetation to slowly grow in the gaps of the larger stones, through the earth and pebbles, and hold the wall in place over time. The incline of the mountain is consistently incorporated into the sustainable design of the school. The circular water system (as a convivial tool) demonstrated various ways of water circulation and collection. We were introduced to the constr...
Transcribe →A fairy tale or a true possibility: traveling long distances by land and sea as a substitution for flying
Nov 12, 2024Tap to summarizeWhen sound and multimedia artist Johanna Sulalampi had to travel from Finland to Germany for a collaboration with Trio Abstrakt, she decided to do it by surface travel. With the support of the Projekt Atol and the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant, she embarked on a eight-night trip. A realistic alternative to flying? In this text, she explores the opportunities of sustainable travel. Text by Johanna Sulalampi I, Johanna Sulalampi (she/they), started this story as an optimist. I wasn’t new to the idea of traveling by land, otherwise known as surface travel. Though in the past I traveled overseas by plane, I also did trips from Southern Finland to other parts of Europe by train, ferry, car, bus and hitchhiking. The most defiant experiment I have done was a bicycle trip from Helsinki to the Venice Art Biennale through the Prague Scenography Quadrennial in the summer 2019. These travels were related to vacations and studies, and my motivation was to decrease the impact on the environment. On this project, my goal was to test surface travel over long distances in the context of working as an artist. My aim was to work on the ferry and train to and from Germany twice. The occasion was my collaboration with the Cologne-based ensemble Trio Abstrakt. The intention was to participate in the rehearsals and premiere of my new work and to deliver the ceramic percussion instruments I made for them for the piece. My area of expertise is sound-based practices, but this was my second ever composition (and the first composition that involved musical notation). That’s why it was essential for me to take part in the rehearsals on the spot. Rehearsing Sulalampi’s new piece at the workspace of the ensemble Trio Abstrakt. © Rachel C. Walker In arts, we certainly need to exchange ideas, values and make connections over the borders. But remote meetings and other internet platforms are simply not the same as meeting face-to-face. Sharing ideas, getting to know each other, and seeing and hearing the results of cooperations are significantly more rewarding in person than when working remotely. The necessity of traveling abroad and its ecological ramifications position artists in situations where difficult choices and justifications have to be made. The situations are often influenced by factors that are not within control. October 2024, the border between Finland and Russia has remained closed for 10 months. Even though the passage between the rest of Europe and Finland has for me never happened through Russia, the closing of the border has created a feeling of being trapped in. Southern Finland now feels more like an island than ever before. Image from the score of Solastalgia. © Johanna Sulalampi Rehearsing at St. Peter’s church Cologne. © Rachel C. Walker Setting up the stage at St. Peter’s church Cologne. © Johanna Sulalampi This situation has made me think about surface travel from another perspective as well. Clear, easy and accessible bus and railway networks would bring a sense of togetherness with the rest of Europe from the perspective of a Finn. But what does accessibility mean in this context? It doesn’t just mean the price, time consumption or the physical disability factors, it also means the psychological accessibility. My travel route from Helsinki to Cologne took two nights. First a local bus and tram to the ferry terminal, then the overnight ferry to Stockholm. From Stockholm, I took the SJ Euro Night train to Hamburg. From Hamburg to Cologne, the Intercity train and the underground took me to the final destination. The amount of problem-solving, planning, waiting and communication situations this type of travel takes can take the best out of anyone. Doing this trip four times on top of a heavy workload drove me very close to exhaustion. I noticed that the quality of work done on a train and ferry suffers because the environment affects the cognitive performance. Traveling itself is kind of a work. Grant providers whom offer subsidies for ecological traveling should include daily allowances. This would make up some for the time lost, and the rest needed after this type of journey. In the discussions I have had about the alternatives to air travel, it has become clear that the vast majority of Westerners know surface traveling is one of the self-evident things individuals can do to reduce their impact on the environment. Unfortunately, traveling has become as a sensitive topic as talking about one’s eating habits. Choosing the train is easy when the trip doesn’t include overnight travel, but making the decision between a three-hour flight and two days surface travel is heavier. Usually booking the flight and figuring out how to get to the airport takes a few hours. Smoothly planned surface routes are rarer, and the planning and reservations take easily many days. The responsibility of a succession of the trips lies with the traveler when the journey won’t go as planned. Johanna Sulalampi behind the mixing console before the concert at St. Peter’s Church Cologne. © Rebecca ter Braak When added, that overnight surface journeys are still multiple times more expensive compared to flying and that the travel itself does not support the well-being of a person’s physiological and psychological essence, the whole discussion about surface traveling being an alternative to flying is kind of a fairy tale. A short narrative familiar to us all, passed on for the generations. It looks like, more than anything else, this narrative stands as a protective dissociative shield between the ‘used to travel generations’ and the embodiment of the causes of flying. Unfortunately, the continuation of an individual’s life in this system requires such stories. After the variable travels and conversations I have had, I believe that the emphasis should not be on how to push individuals to pursue more sustainable choices on travel, but on how to change the travel itself. Martin Creed’s installation work Don’t Worry on the tower of St. Peter’s Church Cologne Germany.© Johanna Sulalampi Capitalism points the finger at the consumer and minimizes democracy to consumption choices, claiming that consumption must change before services can change. This text is a finger pointing back. The services must change so it is realistically possible for the consumers to adapt. The pressure for low-emission travel and the accessibility of flightless travel should be placed on airlines, companies and states that support them, instead of individuals. When developing surface travel alternatives for flying, in addition to the price tags and ecological values, the experiential nature of travel should also be improved and developed. A long journey by land must maintain the individual’s mental and physical endurance so that the experience is comparable to traveling by air on the same journey. It should be noted that the reasons are manifold, and the potentials and needs of traveling by land are different compared to flying. Until those who have the true power for the change in the capitalistic system take responsibility for bringing about the change, surface travel over long distances as a substitution for flying will remain a fairy tale. Ensemble Trio Abstrakt playing the premiere of piece Solastalgia by Johanna Sulalampi. © Rebecca ter Braak Despite the difficulty and exhaustion caused by the travels, the end result of the collaboration with Trio Abstrakt was a new piece of contemporary music for saxophone, piano, percussion, electronics and ceramic self-made instruments. It premiered in St. Peter’s Church at Cologne as a part of Trio Abstrakt’s Confluences concert. I named my new piece Solastalgia, the direct meaning of which is climate anxiety. For me, it more broadly refers to the emotionally unstable times of the climate crisis, when hope and loss are merged together in an inseparable way. In connection with this text, I have added pictures of the peak moments of this fairy tale, instead of showing pictures of different railway stations, pigeons on the platforms looking for crumbs from traveler’s lunch, my takeaway coffee cups and sandwiches on the folding tables of the trains, cold fingers on the first autumn day while waiting for a late train at Hamburg station, a broken train cabin door that was closed w...
Transcribe →Underground subsistence: Feeding beings in the Andes of Ecuador
Oct 31, 2024Tap to summarizeThis spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. Pedro Soler presents here the community which will host the next soil assembly in May 2025. It’s 10 in the morning, in an open field, and we are standing around a woman seated in front of an altar spread out on a cloth. The altar is colorful, full of sweets and fruits and stones. A hole has been dug in the ground just beside it. Violeta is asking for permission, talking to the land, singing as she shakes a rattle. She tells us that the land likes sweet things. One after the other, everyone takes something from the altar and throws it into the hole, thanking and feeding the land. Some women cross themselves as they throw in their orange. And then the hole is filled in with earth. We are in the time of Pawkar Raymi, the March Equinox, in a workshop organized by La Divina Papaya on their farm in Kayambi territory. It is the time of tender grains: corn on the cob and frijoles, lentils and peas, chochos and broad beans and the soup called fanesca made with this harvest and more, 12 ingredients in total, from the Andean chakra or garden. Time for everyone in the community to eat abundantly. Traditionally, nobody is turned away, just as in the chakra no plant is sown alone, plants are also families and communities, they become sad if isolated. The recipe for fanesca is resistance and a guide, instructions of what and when to plant, memory and future of diversity, abundance and collectivity. Not all the compañeras have come today because they’ve been busy selling their grains for people to make fanesca, but quite a few did. Now we are going to make a different kind of fanesca. That’s what Julio, a member of the Ekorural foundation and agricultural investigator, says as he introduces the workshop: “This is a fanesca for the soil.” He starts by asking everyone to participate in organizing the numerous seeds we have brought on a grid laid out on the ground with growth rate on the x axis and required sunlight (which is often the height but not always) on the y axis. Plants feed the life of the soil with their exudates on which fungi and bacteria thrive, feeding in their turn all the other vertiginous cycles of the soil. Then we prepare food for all: rock powder for bacteria, leaf mold from the woodland floor, different composts, pea flour for the fungi, some sand. Everybody participates in throwing everything together, adding the seeds and then mixing it all together. Knowledge and practice of Uku-Pacha Most of these indigenous peasants are women now in their fifties, who have spent their whole lives practicing subsistence agriculture in their chakras. Others are younger peasants who stayed home (or, more rarely, got an education and came back), along with educated post-urban people. Their meeting provides a space for transferring knowledge, building food sovereignty and hopefully surviving through these coming decades of collapse. While the most august scientific bodies have been calling for the agro-ecological transformation of agriculture for quite some time now, in reality those who practice these arts, who have been practicing them for millennia, constitute the poorest and most abandoned sector of society. We live in an upside-down world. In Andean cosmovision, the word Pacha refers to both time and space – so the three pachas that make up the cosmos, above, in-between and below, are real places that accumulate time in layers or spirals. The pacha of the soil, as well as the inside of the body, is Uku Pacha. Uku means inside. Great care should be taken in relation to this realm, residence of the huge serpent Amaru, of the dead and the yet unborn. All underground water is included there too, springs, the bottom of the sea, our internal organs. Each of us is a little world too, and there is no hell below us. The complex interplay of time and space that makes bodies and worlds is always tending toward balance and complementarity. When things get way out of balance, then there is a drastic correction or reversal, an upheaval and change of cycle, called Pachakutik. Looking South and West from the field, on the horizon are massive greenhouses, filled with roses, generators, pumps, machines grinding up rose stalks for compost, ultra-low frequencies. The rural world is a battleground now. Agribusiness snaps up the land of migrants, peasants tired of being poor or disconnected heirs, and transforms them into highly technified, productive greenhouses. It is an industry that generates a lot of money, the fifth-most important export of Ecuador, but screams fragility, completely dependent on fossil-fueled airplanes to deliver a non-essential good to the North, at a huge environmental cost. The combination of economics and emissions means that it has no viable future, yet it all just gets faster, bigger, wider. Now the majority of young people here work in the flower greenhouses. They don’t cultivate anymore and eat processed food from the corner shops. A wage instead of a garden, and then there are no more gardens. The good life: getting together with others When Maria Mies studied subsistence farming among women in Bangladesh in the 1980s, she found that it was the key to autonomy and a good life. The “subsistence perspective” that she developed from these and other investigations is in explicit resistance to global patriarchal capitalism and its devastating impacts. It is life production instead of commodity production. In the Andes this is called Sumak Kawsay, good living: “Subsistence is not shortcoming and misery, as we are constantly made to believe. If it is understood correctly that is, and not as individual subsistence – which is not possible – then you always have to get together with others to do something, not only to survive, but to live well. Then it is actually possible to create the good life. You experience that you are your own authority, that together with others, you’re sovereign.” [1] Now Julio has stopped explaining and everyone is working. The compañeras are planting trees and roses, filling in with the magic mix, soil food, soul food. They work fast, economy and power of their movements as they open holes for the plants, confident bodies in the frontier between worlds. The young men and women are there amongst them, one is operating the wheelbarrow, another is measuring the distances between the roses, others are planting. As the direct heirs of the peasant line get older, there are fewer and fewer young people to take up the mantle, and migration is having a huge impact on the rural areas. But all this could change in a second, or at least in a few weeks, without diesel. During the pandemic, many young people returned to work alongside their parents or grandparents. The national strike of 2021 lasted 18 days, all the roads were closed, and local food production suddenly became of critical importance. All the prices went up, and then things went back to normal. But soon, there will be no going back to normal. The Pachakutik is here and a small farm or peasant future is now – as Chris Smaje [2] points out, “our best shot for creating future societies that are tolerably sustainable in ecological terms and fulfilling in nutritional and psychosocial ones.” Inevitably, as temperatures and sea levels rise in the tropical areas, everyone will be flocking to the mountains where there is still water and agriculture. They’ll come from other parts of the Andes too, when the glaciers finally disappear. If an agro-ecological peasant transition were in progress, needing lots of hands, lots of organisms and with fair access to land, there would be work for them when they arrive: gardening, guiding water, building soil, tending to life. Subsistence work, collective work, with plenty of time for art. But for this to happen there needs to be some sort of collapse or revolution, a deep cultural and existential change. Young people already migrate here in search of subsistence work under the vigilant gaze of armed guards in the greenhouses that cover the valley. Maybe starving refugees will soon work the greenhouses in return for only bad food and a dormitory bunk. Like the estates of the bad old days, but with cameras, machines and chemicals, or the fortified farms in the movie “Soylent Green”. Maize demands little work compared to the bounty of its harvests [3]. Potatoes wait beneath the surface until you need them, invisible to the conqueror’s eyes. A diverse plant diet with a bit of guinea pig from time to time and chicken and chicha for a party. It’s been done before, a good life of infinite imagination within the limits of subsistence, just as the poet Tao Yuanming wrote 1600 years ago in China: “At a single glance I survey the whole Universe. What pleasures can compare with these?” From 8-10 of May 2025, a Soil Assembly (Tinku Uku Pacha) will be held in the community of La Chimba, near Cayambe in Ecuador, bringing togethe...
Transcribe →Tinku Uku Pacha in Ecuador: towards a second Soil Assembly in 2025
Oct 29, 2024Tap to summarizeConcerned by the worries and hopes of COP 16 on biodiversity currently taking place in Cali, Colombia, the Soil Assembly network is taking the opportunity to promote Tinku Uku Pacha, the next international meeting dedicated to art, soil and indigenous knowledge, to be held at the Transito Amaguaña Intercultural Community Center in Ecuador’s upper La Chimba valley, at the foot of the magnificent Cayambe volcano. Announcement. “The protagonist of the decisive struggle for re-existence in the Plantationocene is soil, the cradle and grave of organic life, where bodies and inorganic matter meet and exchange their properties, nurturing and destroying each other in a restless process of decay and regeneration. Populated by beings of all kinds – stones and leaves, insects, roots, water, air – soil is the stage on which the planetary drama of life and nonlife has been unfolding for the last 450 million years.” Federico Luisetti in The Laboratory Planet #6 Almost all life on Earth depends on the soil yet 30% of the planet’s soils are currently dead and 90% are projected to be dead by 2050 if we continue on the current course of agricultural practices and climate change. Soil is now the scene of a fierce planetary battle for subsistence. Minerals, fuels, water, agriculture, carbon sinks, health and cosmovision, past and future – all these issues intersect in the Uku Pacha, the spacetime of the interior in the Andean cosmovision, where the practices and knowledge we need to live and die well in the Anthropocene are to be found. Promoting Tinku Uku Pacha in the streets of Cali, Colombia. Poster design: José Luis Jácome Guerrero Soil Assembly #1 was held in Kochi, Kerala, in India in 2023 with the aim of promoting awareness of the soil through art, science and peasant and indigenous knowledge. Soil Assembly #2 will be held in May 2025 in La Chimba, Ecuador, a rural community in the Andes, where the great peasant and indigenous leader Tránsito Amaguaña lived and died. She is the inspiration for the gathering and our Uku Pacha guide, emissary of the ancestors, of the soil and of the struggle, reminding us of who the enemy is and of the goals of popular unity, indigenous culture and access to livelihoods. In La Chimba there is a center dedicated to her memory, to indigenous resistance, interpretation of the territory and intercultural creation: the Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña (CICTA), founded in 2009 by presidential decree with the impulse of the community. In the month of April 2025 there will be two artistic residencies, Ronny Albuja (Ecu) and Tau Luna Acosta (Co), who will work on themes of soil, territory and communities. Ronny Albuja – together with his team Santiago Tapia, Daniel Gachet and TierraCroma – will be focused on sonifying soil chromatographies sampled from the territory, interpreting the circular images through digital and ancestral technologies. Tau Luna Acosta’s proposal is entitled “Metabolic alliances to digest a decaying world”, a phrase that sums up very well the general objectives of Tinku Uku Pacha. Rosa Elena Tránsito Amaguaña Alba (September 10, 1909 – May 10, 2009) was an Ecuadorian leader of the indigenous movement and one of the founders of the Ecuadorian Indian Federation (FEI) along with Dolores Cacuango. Tinku Uku Pacha: Asamblea del Suelo The exhibitions resulting from the residencies will be inaugurated on May 8, 2025, the first day of Tinku Uku Pacha: Asamblea del Suelo #2. This first day, starting in the morning and streamed by Internet, will be curated by La Divina Papaya. It will focus on the peasant economy and the search for an agriculture that can regenerate the soil and, at the same time, economically sustain peasant families. Cattle and flower farms, currently the economic base of the communities, do not maintain healthy soils or generate food sovereignty. The great challenge is to find forms of economy for the agricultural transition. In rich countries, the vast majority of the population has little or no contact with the land: in Germany, for instance, only 2% work in agriculture. In Ecuador, a large part of the population still works in the countryside: despite constant emigration, it still represents 30% of national employment. Today the heirs of Tránsito Amaguaña, the indigenous women, with their arts of subsistence are still here, frugal and inventive, with strength to fight and time to party. The encounter between peasant and neo-peasant, between urban and rural, man and woman, economy and subsistence, human and more than human, is now crucial for the soil and with it our collective future, our capacity for resistance and our good living. These are the alliances that must be woven to ensure the transmission of the arts of subsistence and care of life. Art can contribute, document, provoke and suggest. Imagine new economies, open up senses, sensations, comprehension and possibilities for progress according to the new/old rhythms of culture that must emerge in a post-growth and post-extractivist civilization. Unlimited imagination within the physical limits of the planet. Just as food supply chains have to be shortened, so does the access to spaces of culture and memory, nourishing and strengthening local and planetary communities. The second day of Tinku Uku Pacha, May 9, 2025, brings together a wide variety of voices and visions, countries and continents, to share views on soil and planetary peasantry, in an international assembly dedicated to the science, art and politics of soil. Leading international and local thinkers, leaders, peasants and artists, contribute to the debate during the day. As with every day, the activities will be webcast with simultaneous translation and shared directly with parallel events in other spaces around the world. Each evening a video mapping and sound environment will be presented, voices from the past and future, resonating around the courtyard of the CICTA and circulating on the white walls of the buildings. On Saturday May 10th 2025, as on every May 10th, the community of La Chimba celebrates the commemoration of Mama Tránsito Amaguaña with a ceremony. This year, under the authority of the President of the Confederation of the Kayambi People, Denisse de La Cruz, and Carlos Alba, President of the Community of La Chimba, indigenous women leaders from all over the country are invited to share their visions and leadership, creating agendas and tracing paths for the defense of life and peasant and indigenous resistance. After the midday “pambamesa”, where food and drink are shared, the communities participate in a contest of “coplas”, the songs of the Kayambi women, with cash prizes and a celebrity jury. In the evening concerts of artists from this territory: Ñukanchic Taki, Jatun Mama and DJ Entrañas. The main hall of the Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña on May 10, the day commemorating Amaguaña’s death.. Credit: Pedro Soler The meeting closes on Sunday, May 11, 2025 with a guided walk through the territory of La Chimba – Yakuchimba, the braid of water – and a final assembly to share impressions, desires and coordination for the future. Everyone is welcome online or in person to participate in Tinku Uku Pacha: Soil Assembly #2. There are worlds within this world where other futures grow. To know more about the community that will host the Soil Assembly in Ecuador. To keep informed follow SoilAssembly on Instagram or the regular updates on soilassembly.net
Transcribe →Human-flamingos, queer pokemons and other unique creatures at the BioFeral camp in Crete
Oct 26, 2024Tap to summarizeThe latest camp in the BioFeral.BeachCamp series of Ionian University’s Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence program was held in Crete at the end of September. Lyn Hagan immerses us in the queer world of the organizers and participants of this decidedly feral lab. TTTlabs BioFeral.BeachCamp III: NewRepro-FlaOctomingopus – Non-Human Bioart/Bodyart on the Beach (BFBC NR-FO NB-BB) took place from September 15-25th 2024 in Athens School of Fine Arts’ Annex of Rethymno in the island of Crete, Greece. It was the final part of a trilogy of art camps conceived and led by bio artist Adam Zaretsky and Professor Dalila Honorato from Ionian University, who also organises the TTT conferences (Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science) as well as FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science and Technology. This BioFeral Beach Camp threw a speculative thematic framework around research looking at new forms of reproduction, both human and non-human, artificial wombs, assisted and natural implantation, queer ecology and artificial intelligence. The selected and invited participants (16 on site and 5 online) interrogated these ideas through the prisms of their own practice and were drawn from the fields of bio-art, performance art, sculpture, science communication, microbiology, literature, curation, though it was difficult sometimes to know where these boundaries were as there was substantial overflow between methods and ideas. The theme of implantation was fitting as some artists took to the environment and ethos of the camp, whilst others found it a difficult environment within which to make work, or even talk about their practice in. There were strong personalities within the group, many different sexualities, genders, ages, races but feminist, Marxist and post-human philosophies dominated with words like ‘entanglements’ and ‘making kin’ proliferating in both the form and terminology of the performances and presentations that took place. Over the first days, people began to share their experiences and perspectives over dinner, especially those from the Global South about their migrant status in other countries, about white supremacy, politics, queerness, murders in the family and of course, Palestine. Again, it was sometimes difficult to know where boundaries lay and conversation occasionally got messy and piqued. A Speculative Union of Flamingo, Urchin, and Rice Trying to establish the impact of live research performances on its audience is difficult but when everyone gets out a camera and starts taking photos and filming, that is often a good indication. Kristin Lucas (USA) and Nathalie Dubois Calero (Canada) collaborative performance ‘Stamping Genes: A Speculative Union of Flamingo, Urchin, and Rice’ was a radical act of symbiosis between both artist’s work and research. Kristin has been interrogating the idea of the double in her practice for many years and in her performative framing of flamingo conservation, this double is non-human. Nathalie brought her training as a scientist and knowledge of non-human and human microbiomes, and the viruses in our DNA. Together these forms of knowledge and practice were twinned in a speculative performance where Kristin, dressed as a human-flamingo underwent a ritualistic transformation through an experimental IVF implantation of sea urchin microbiota and genes through sperm release, using rice as a biological interface between flamingos, humans and sea urchins. The scene ended with the sounds of sea urchins and flamingos echoing through a transformed ecological landscape, designed to signify the preservation and continuation of this new evolutionary form. Stamping Genes: A Speculative Union of Flamingo, Urchin, and Rice, Collaborating Artists: Nathalie Dubois Calero and Kristin Lucas, Photo Credit: Adam Zaretsky. Pictured here with Sea Urchin, Embryo Implantation Catheter, Flamingo Costumage and Simulated brackish pond water with real rice. TTTlabs Bioarts Ethical Advisory Komission (BEAK) Bioart Animal Care and Use Committee (BAICUC) stamp of approval: Sea urchins were used, cared for and returned to their site of origin biome habitat in a timely and bioethically upright manner. Chiara Pitrola (Netherlands) performed a new iteration of her hydration liturgies series ‘Trancecorporeal’, surrounded by half-made small stone sculptures that littered the beautiful setting under the arch of the main building where still humans also gathered to be shaded from the sun. Audience members sat in a circle whilst self-declared hydro-feminist Chiara played a soundscape she has made and handed out ice as part of her pleasure activism. This performance towards the end of the 10 days together, was sensuous in its delivery and content and worked, perhaps unintentionally, to bring the group together in an encounter that allowed for a pause in activities, and relaxation. Designing Pokemons in a Virtual Queer Environment Isidora (Ipi) Paz Fernandez (Chile) gave a talk on queer ecology and led a workshop to get the participants actively embracing the Pokemon as a queer ecological being. People were paired together in a Virtual Queer Environment to design a creature using the following parameters: species, queer behaviours, reproduction style and tasked with creating an image using AI, along with its superpowers. She closed the session with projecting her own creation onto her stomach, though my favourite just because of its name, was Elton Fly John created by Praba Pillar (USA) and Janet Sarson (USA). Their final performance revolved around a kind of multi-tiered form of embrace. They embraced each other whilst performing ‘Cicada Panoramas’ which explored the dirty art of symbiotic non-human queer mothering and enrichment, emerging like the cicadas they gathered the husks of, writhing to a background soundtrack of A.I./human embrace. Ipi Fernandez screening the screen pokemon game on her belly. Credits: Dalila Honorato “Adam performed a fertilized zygote meeting the utrine endometrium for the first time as a blastula or early embryo could experience it. After a short technical and scientific talk about embryo implantation and development, he laid down and became tidily vacuum wrapped in a red rubber latex sheet, breathing through a tube. A lot of us tried it, and it has been a deep haptic experience, the plastic warmth wrapping us, the connection through a tube.” – Nathalie Dubois Calero. Credits: Kristin Lucas Ivana Tkalčić (Croatia) showed us her accelerationist video work that tapped into the information overload of our current times, followed by documentation from her time taking part in Astronaut training as part of the European Space Agency program, inspired by her countries decision to launch a space agency. She explained the uncomfortable nature of being in such close restrictive confines with others and deglamourized the often hyped-up space migration sci-fi stories familiar from the hippy-Utopian dreams of yesteryear and contemporary techno feudal lullabies like those from Musk et al. Online fellows Xristina Sarli (Germany) and Augusto Calçada (Brazil) from Terrabytes Glitch Lab worked tirelessly in the background to make a live virtual environment in tandem with the proceedings and the participants were given characters based on questionnaires they voluntarily answered. Virtual chimeric environment by Terrabytes Glitch Lab. Biomaterials: fingernails, skin flakes, saliva, hair, sperm, metal scraps, flower petals and general donated human/other viscera Nafsika Tzanoulinou (Greece) and Nikolas Marcellos (Greece), both students at the prestigious Athens School of Fine Art, drew upon more traditional mediums like drawin...
Transcribe →Composing in Lapland, where the landscape becomes a verb
Oct 15, 2024Tap to summarizeIn July 2024, Johanna Ruotsalainen went to Sápmi* for an art residency. With the support of Projekt Atol and the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant, she travelled through Finland, Sweden and Norway, encountering the landscape and its musicality. Text and photos by Johanna Ruotsalainen Open landscapes stimulate imagination; The echo in the open landscape produces a sonorous dimension to a solo instrument through resonance – I experimented with the phenomenon applying a human voice to landscape. *Sápmi is the cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sámi people, stretching across the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. This area has also been referred to in English as Lapland. Johanna Ruotsalainen (she/her) is a Finnish composer and visual artist, currently working as a dissertation researcher in University of Lapland. In recent years, Ruotsalainen has collaborated with some of the most acclaimed international contemporary performers, ensembles and festivals, such as Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse (FR), Ligeti Quartet (UK), Mise-en Ensemble (NY) and Gewandhaus Orchestra (GE), and she is the holder of the prestigious Hanns Eisler composition Scholar of 2020. Coming from the Arctic area, Ruotsalainen is working to increase the inclusion of marginal voices to the globalized, Western-centered and historically colonialized definition of high-arts: Culture is used to perpetuate differences by giving visibility and experience of belonging only to certain stories. Criteria for artistic quality are not traditionally verbalized in detail but are hidden behind peer and expert evaluations. The artistic quality presented and perceived as universal can obscure the mechanisms that maintain inequality, which produces exclusion based on for example place of origin. In July 2024 I travelled from Northern Finland to Northern Sweden and Northern Norway with my family of four by driving our camper van, biking and walking. I wanted to write a series of musical compositions in meaningful and relevant locations, thus letting my surroundings leak into my composition work as perceptions, experiences, influences and interactions. Some of the sites were already familiar to me, others I discovered after wandering around aimlessly in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi. Working and travelling grants make it possible to pause and spend time just thinking. The opportunity to actively listen to one’s environment is a prerequisite for composing. Balancing between motherhood and artistry is challenging both in terms of time and finances. Being able to travel and work with family improves gender equality in the industry, as non-male composers have traditionally been marginalized in the classical and concert music contexts.. Through travelling I pursue to experience place as a geographical, social, subjective and spatial entity. Bodily place-making is both method and content in my art practice. The idea of composing on site is based on a traditional Arctic concept of landscape, where place is understood as an interaction. Curator, writer and researcher Jan-Erik Lundström has described Arctic local’s unique relationship with land aptly: “Landscape is not a noun, an object or a thing, but always a verb, an activity, an event.” Art practices featuring walking and walk-related methods have been widely used in contemporary art mediums, for example in environmental art, performance art, sculpture, conceptual art, and land art; My immersion into Arctic landscape as artistic practice is about understanding the character of place through the movement of the body – about collecting and transforming spatial knowledge into artistic interpretation of a place. I describe this method of researching place as ‘spatial place-making’: The conception of the world is embedded in the lived body, as spatiality helps understanding landscape in relation to time, place, space and movement. Spatial place-making has an association also to composing, as music is an art medium happening in space and in time, as a movement of musical material. Open landscapes stimulate imagination; The echo in the open landscape produces a sonorous dimension to a solo instrument through resonance – I experimented with the phenomenon applying a human voice to landscape. I often ended up composing by shores. The sound of the waves creates a rhythmic frame with an unexpected presence of sticky and slouching pulsation. The spatial interaction between composer and space when walking and composing in Sápmi in July produced a series of musical interactions, that are place-specific: The compositions as sovereign artworks, detached from this interaction, are for me irrelevant and without a context. The nature of the work changes significantly if compositions are brought into the performance conventions of institutional art, such as the concert setting. The project I implemented as part of the Rewilding Cultures -program is the first phase of a long-term research, where the goal is to develop a navigation map application, via which user can experience site-specific works when physically being on site. I work towards widening the definition of art to include different performance and exhibition practices alongside with those traditionally recognized as acceptable platforms for artistic expression and sharing. Next phase in project is planned to happen in Spring 2026, when I’m planning to travel again driving, walking and skiing to compose on site in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi in winter conditions; How does the perceptions and interactions with those same sites change, when my immersion in the landscape happens during the polar night? I captured the natural soundscapes of the chosen sites with an mp3-recorder and merged into the compositions. Johanna Ruotsalainen is the recipient of a mobility grant awarded as part of the Rewilding Cultures cooperation project co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.
Transcribe →Feral Circuits: Rewilding electro-cultures at HomeMade 2024
Oct 12, 2024Tap to summarizeReflections on a journey to the Swiss Mechatronic Art Society’s Homemade summer camp from July 27 to August 4, 2024 by Miranda Moss, laureate of the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant. A rainbow arched across the mountains as Gandalf led us up the valley toward the wooden mountain house. Birds of prey soared above us, circling the steep Alpine fields as mist swirled around their wings, cowbells tinkling in the distance. Upon arriving at the house, we were greeted by fellow campers, already engrossed in their “laser geeking,” hunched over a high-powered laser beaming into the mist. They joked that they had formulated the rainbow especially for our arrival—a fitting welcome to a place where fairytale-like landscapes mingled with technical witchcraft and wizardry. Arriving at the SummerCamp. Photo by Gandalf Schaufelberger. This magical yet very real setting was the 2024 Swiss Mechatronic Art Society’s (SGMK) annual summer camp, “HomeMade.” Set in a different mountain house each year, the camp takes advantage of Switzerland’s culture of mountain and hiking communities, and turns these spaces into weird and wonderful places for experimentation. Electronics enthusiasts, artists, families, musicians, engineers, nature-lovers and curious minds of all kinds come together for a week to live, work, cook and create together, with the goal of exchanging ideas, sharing knowledge, and collaborating on projects. While most participants are based in Switzerland with long ties to the SGMK, many also travel from across Europe to join, and there are always several who travelled from further afield; this year, for example, there were friends joining from India, Lebanon, Cameroon, Brazil and Indonesia. Many of these are already on a longer residency in Switzerland, and so such a camp becomes quite an amazing intersection of practitioners on this residency-within-a-residency meetup. We joined this talented crew with the specific interest of continuing research and cultivating workshops and documentation, along with the community, on human scale, creative and sustainable energy systems with feminist values. Homemade workshop vibes, with DJ Livia and Claude making the KaosGlam synth designed by Paula Pin. Photo by Thomas Amberg. When I say “we,” I’m referring to myself, an artist, designer and educator working across engineering and biology and largely preoccupied with electronics and energy systems, and Urs Gaudenz, a creative microengineer, self-taught biologist, and founder of GaudiLabs. Urs describes GaudiLabs as a “third space for third culture,” a meeting point for art, science, and technology, based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Here, he runs an open source business, developing cutting edge scientific equipment and electronic musical instruments, allowing high-tech processes to be more accessible. It has been such an honour to have been able to collaborate with him over the last year, and so I made sure that after my long, but smooth, train ride from Sweden to Switzerland, to factor in some time where we could work together in GaudiLabs before the summercamp. Here, we totally indulged in blue sky ideas, including developing self-powered artificial finger nails with LEDs embedded, and researching the possibility of gleaning iron from menstrual blood to make compostable, mining-free circuit boards. We also reactivated our interest in nanomaterials science by buying a bag of clay, and experimenting with all its amazing properties, including for the fabrication of the above-mentioned circuit boards, passive cooling systems, pump-free watering systems for agriculture, membranes for microbial fuel cells, and of course, some gorgeous pottery companions for the home. We couldn’t wait to get to the summer camp to forage for wild clay and to continue these experiments. Urs working with wild clay on a self-built potter’s wheel with mouth-operated speed control. This year, the camp took place in the Jura region of Switzerland, which has a fascinating history where, at the turn of the last century, saw the words ‘watchmaker’ and ‘anarchist’ becoming synonymous. Resisting industrialisation and the exploitation of workers, these watchmakers were formative in the development of worker’s rights across Europe, and the region still hosts the largest global anarchist meetup in the world. One person who came from this region (his uncle was one of these watchmakers), is legendary SGMK member Michel Pauli, a peace activist and technology enthusiast who has been keeping an open source digital school, solar training centre, and community maker space running in Limbe, Cameroon, alongside his wife, Chanceline Ngainku. Coming from a practice of using DIY communications technologies as revolutionary tools in various conflict regions in the world to defend human rights, in the past 15 years he has “settled down“ in the conflict zone in the english-speaking part of Cameroon where he set up the ‘Association Linux Friends’. I spent the majority of HomeMade working closely with Michel and Urs, to develop ideas and prototypes that could be used within the context of the school and community space in Cameroon, where they hope to expand their activities and grow greater confidence in working with electronics. We started with fabricating a small scale gravity battery (chemical batteries are so 1800), which inspired Lina Lopez and Fadri Pestalozzi to synchronously work on a small scale vortex water turbine, which is similar in principle. We moved on to developing power conditioning and charge control circuitry for a small solar charger with Maximum Power Point Tracking, with a lot of extra special care for lithium cells (which we scavenged from the trash in old laptop batteries). This itself was a continuation of where we left off in the research project Regenerative Energy Communities, which had just come to an official end, after developing the project ‘windternet’. Having a background in traditional arts, my electronics knowledge is entirely curiosity-fuelled and community supported, and community learning environments such as HomeMade have been instrumental in my knowledge-building process. Through the community, I have recently learnt how to reflow solder Surface Mount Devices (more on this later), and at the last HomeMade I attended, I was treated to a workshop on how to design circuits using open source software. The first circuit board I etched was also with the guidance of the SGMK. It was really special to see all of these skills coming together this summer. The soldering never stops! Me etching circuit boards in the background during a performance by Noisio. Photo by Oli Jäggi. Through learning all this techy geeky stuff, I hope to bring artistic and creative approaches to electronics and energy to more diverse, non-technical demographics. To me, it seems a convenient problematic of the medium, to seem difficult, inaccessible, dangerous, unintervenable. If we want to get anywhere with a Just energy transition, these practices need to be opened to more than engineers. We need more poets writing about copper, cobalt and full wave bridge rectifiers. We need grandmothers with knowledge of fermentation and crochet to be involved in the design of agrivoltaic systems. We need musicians to circuit bend hydroelectric dams and offshore wind farms. We need Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood films glorifying train drivers and making biogas bus operators sexy, instead of pilots and space capitalists. We need to drastically change the cultures underlying the technologies we use, design, and pollute with We also need those who have historically been excluded from – and often bear the socio-ecological burden of – the development of electrical technologies, to rethink electrical technologies. Flashing back to working on the Cameroon project, we were thinking of not just how to keep up with trends in electronics manufacture, but also imagining how these processes can be made more sustainable and accessible. We don’t just want to keep up, we want to do it better than the toxic capitalist, colonial industry. And, of course, we only want to bring the freshest, most advanced technologies to Africa, while they are still bare and able to be built upon and hacked. #Africaisthefuture! At the etching sta...
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