# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
29.03.24 - 26.06.24
Nisha Ramayya invites people to take a listening walk; a journey through real and imagined landscapes that's conducted through sound. We all have different experiences of hearing and not hearing; our bodies respond to sound, music and noise in different ways. What happens when we gather to listen, conjure voices and choruses, and create our own social rhythms?

The poet offers an invitation and an opportunity to speculate about what we might discover if we use our sensory organs alongside our extra-sensory perceptions to tune into other frequencies. We might encounter other beings, other forms of knowledge, other worlds. Nisha is interested in what this speculative listening practice could teach us about social life, about navigating harmony and dissonance. Poetry, for her is a way of reaching out, to try and resonate with others, however brief the connection.
About Nisha Ramayya
Nisha works across poetry, criticism and collaborative performance, and teaches creative writing. She's the author of States of the Body Produced by Love (Ignota, 2019). The poems here are from her new collection, Fantasia, which is published by Granta in August this year. Fantasia hazards a listening walk, through seashells, telecommunication networks and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. These poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth, are guided by Alice Coltrane's experiments in jazz and spiritual community.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chapter | Nisha Ramayya: A Listening Walk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Set up in 1971, we're an international centre for contemporary arts and culture | Sefydlwyd Chapter yn 1971, ac mae'n ganolfan rhwngwladol ar gyfer y celfyddydau cyfoes a diwylliant.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Acoustic Commons is an emerging network of live environmental streams drawing attention to the unique sounds of particular places across Europe and beyond.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are delighted to present Isabel Barfod's new Margaret Tait Commission '​How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' at Glasgow Film Theatre, on the evening of Monday 29 April. The screening will be followed by informal drinks at the State Bar.

'How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' is an intimate gathering of testimony. Composed of experimental animation and audio recordings of conversations with Black swimmers living in Glasgow and London, this film considers the phenomenological resonance that emerges from swimming and its enigmatic relation with Blackness.

Sound recordings of 11 conversations are collaged into a sonic architecture, forming the narrative body of the work, a way to both describe and speculate on the ephemeral states of alteration or transcendence various encounters with water can facilitate. Meditating on how these encounters can be enabled by affirming social practices, and precluded by mechanisms of regulation, coloniality and enclosure.

Invested in the sensory as an experiential field for staging Black spatial liberation, ​'How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' applies immersive, abstracted imagery using CGI, traditional 2D animation and underwater footage, performing as witness and respondent to oral testimony and aural experience.

'How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' seeks to invoke the aquatic animation of interiority, rememory, non-linearity, entanglement and submergence. Speculative arrangements for Black social life resurface alongside ideas of light:dark, presence:non-presence, legibility:opacity and surface:depth. Probing possibility from embodiment to ask questions of our incommensurable capacity to hold, listen, sense and what it means to bear witness.

Portrait of Isabel Barfod by Erika Steveson, 2024.

Isabel Barfod

Isabel Barfod is an animator and artist based in Glasgow. Working across digital, hand-drawn, 2D and 3D animation, her work is driven by irritation and speculation, looking to process agitations through drawing, scratching and mark making.

Her practice seeks to draw out the ​'hard-to-describe' micro/​experiences, feelings and phenomena associated with moving in and out of private/​public space as a Black Queer person. Cloaking figures and gestures in abstraction, she evokes absurd, surreal and racialised social realities residing within the ephemeral encounter. As a means of working through her own uncertainty and frustrations, she images reparative and restitutive possibilities that are collectively-imagined and speculated.

Previous screenings, grants and commissions include: Margaret Tait Commission (2023/​24), Edinburgh Film Festival (2023), In Motion Festival London & Rotterdam (2023), Flamin' Animations Commission with Film London (2022 2023), Screening at London International Animation Festival, Barbican, London (2022), We Are Here Scotland - Creators Fund (2021) Screening at We Are Here Scotland Creators Showcase, Scotland (2022), Tramway TV - Sidesteps (2022), Take Me Somewhere - sendiri by Claricia Parinussa (2021), Screening at Africa in Motion Film Festival - Sidesteps (original), Scotland (2019).

Introduction by Kitty Anderson, LUX Scotland Director: 10 mins

Isabel Barfod, ​'How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' (2024): 52 mins

Total running time: 62 mins

'How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' is captioned.

A transcript of the introduction will be available.

The event is free to attend, but ticketed. A limited number of wheelchair accessible tickets are available. Tickets are available to book directly through Glasgow Film Theatre here.

Thematic content notes: Sensory content notes:
The film contains some flashing images.

The film failed the Harding Test with 11 incidents of Luminance Flash (from 01:02:53 to 01:09:20) and 3 incidents of Extended Failure (from 01:03:03 to 01:03:08). The report showed no incidents of Red Flash or Spatial Pattern.

The Harding Test is an automatic test for photosensitive epilepsy (PSE) provocative image sequences in video content. The test analyses the video frames from second to second to identify any flashing or stationary patterns.

Glasgow Film Theatre has level access at the main entrance with a permanent ramp. Cinema 1, an accessible toilet and the upstairs bar can be reached via lift. For more information on venue accessibility please see the access section of Glasgow Film Theatre's website here.

Image descriptions:

1: A virtual sculpture of a rendered whirlpool in vivid azure blue. The central spiral of the sculpture narrows and blends seamlessly into the digitally crafted water-like texture surrounding it. Precise ripples and waves radiate from the centre, simulating the rhythmic movement of water. The play of light within the image casts highlights and shadows over the fluid forms, giving the impression of a luminous and dynamic body of water captured in a static digital frame.

2: A landscape photograph of Isabel Barfod. The artist is sat in a chair in an empty room with a plain white wall behind her. Isabel faces the camera directly. Low lighting creates deep grey and blue tones. Isabel's left hand rests on her knee and her right hand on the wooden arm of the chair. Isabel is wearing a loose fitting black polo neck jumper with billowing sleeves. The small amount of light illuminating Isabel catches her silver jewellery, including rings on her right hand, an ornate hoop earring in her right ear, and a chain necklace.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Margaret Tait Commission 2023 | Isabel Barfod, 'How Much Air Lungs Can Hold'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are delighted to present Isabel Barfod's new Margaret Tait Commission '​How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' at Glasgow Film Theatre, on the evening of Monday 29 April. The screening will be followed by informal drinks at the State Bar. 'How Much Air Lungs Can Hold' is an intimate gathering of testimony.

# data[].attributes.headline
Event | ‘Sea Mediations: Hydro-criticism and Tidal Thinking’ – Symposium (University of Amsterdam)

# data[].attributes.subject
Event | ‘Sea Mediations: Hydro-criticism and Tidal Thinking’ – Symposium (University of Amsterdam)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Event | ‘Sea Mediations: Hydro-criticism and Tidal Thinking’ - Symposium [Updated] - Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Event | ‘Sea Mediations: Hydro-criticism and Tidal Thinking’ - Symposium | Dates: 30-31 May 2024 | Location: University of Amsterdam | Credits: 2 ECTS

# data[].attributes.headline
Artist Duo - Studio Thinkinghand artwork - TIDE 

# data[].attributes.subject
Artist Duo - Studio Thinkinghand artwork - TIDE 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Celestial bodies and gravitational forces move tide and coastline landscapes in a constant and powerful ebb and flow. The Tide series documents the repeated meetings between industrial materials with the oceans and planetary forces, salt, oxidation, wind, water, rocks, seaweed to register intra-relating life in the intertidal region over time, rendering nature as painter.

All waters have flowed through the vast reservoir of life.

Timeless and changeless, it is fluid and whole. Hard edges erode.

What otherwise might remain apart, are dissolved, softened and united.

The great receptacle of the landscape.

Turn and return through the force of gravity to pure space.

Syzygy. Repeated meetings.

Nourishing darkness.

Vast void and power.

We are all bodies of water

3 BODIES OF WATER

The 3 oxidised iron plates are registrations of the 3 bodies of water around Denmark, Kattegat, Baltic Sea and the Northern Sea in repeated meetings and intra-actions. As in syzygy when 3 or more celestial bodies are aligned, Tidal forces are either reinforced causing bimonthly Tidal phenomena of spring tides or counteract each other resulting in neap tides with the lowest tidal ranges. This work explores the entanglements and intra-actions between humans, industry and nature as a reminder that we are all bodies of water in flows of becoming and transformations.

Iron plate markings.

Various times, various sizes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Studio ThinkingHand b/ Rhoda Ting & Mikkel Dahlin Bojesen |Tides

# data[].attributes.body
Drawing the peninsula from memory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Peninsula 2023 Bodies are time capsules - storing memory from distant times and places. Recalling the boundless memory of her high school history teacher,...

# data[].attributes.headline
Glasgow - Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies is a performance playing with the connections between trans bodies, boglands and the ancient Celtic rituals honouring them. Emerging from the research of three artists living across Glasgow and the Shetland Islands with a shared devotion to wetlands, this solstice ritual performance explores what boglands can teach us about commitment to deep time and resistance to the tyranny of productivity. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Glasgow - Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies is a performance playing with the connections between trans bodies, boglands and the ancient Celtic rituals honouring them. Emerging from the research of three artists living across Glasgow and the Shetland Islands with a shared devotion to wetlands, this solstice ritual performance explores what boglands can teach us about commitment to deep time and resistance to the tyranny of productivity. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dates and Opening times

Thu 20 June, 6pm - 10pm

Travel information and event booking details available from May.

Presented by

Rabindranth X Bhose, Belladonna Paloma & Oren Shoesmith

Supported by

Supported by Glasgow International with funds from the Scottish Government's Festivals EXPO Fund. With special thanks to East Dunbartonshire Council.

Accessiblity

Limited Access: Wheelchair accessible bog with a boardwalk

Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies is a performance playing with the connections between trans bodies, boglands and the ancient Celtic rituals honouring them. Emerging from the research of three artists living across Glasgow and the Shetland Islands with a shared devotion to wetlands, this solstice ritual performance explores what boglands can teach us about commitment to deep time and resistance to the tyranny of productivity. Belladonna Paloma, Oren Shoesmith, and Rabindranath X Bhose will lead audience members on a walk through Lenzie Moss, a peatland north of Glasgow. During the walk, visitors will witness a boggy dance inspired by ancient rituals to mark the season's change. Votive sculptures will be exhibited within Lenzie Moss for the duration of Glasgow International, enabling a self-guided bog walk.

Tacitus called the preserved bodies found in bogs 'corpores infames', or 'disreputable bodies', referencing his belief that they were killed and buried by Celtic tribes for their homosexuality. The work reclaims this derogatory moniker and finds its reparative power, considering trans people as the 'disreputable bodies' of our current moment. Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies expands the idea of disreputable bog bodies to the bog as a whole ecosystem, as well as to trans bodies, proving both are resistant to capitalist frameworks.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies is a performance playing with the connections between trans bodies, boglands and the ancient Celtic rituals honouring them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kilter, Matter and Ghosts | Cork Midsummer Festival

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Genre-defying new solo performance - in a swimming pool - using movement, film, and sound.

# data[].attributes.headline
material form research - (other ways to listen) -  cassette - Upstream Ensemble, an aqueous sound piece initiated and composed by field recordist and artist Pablo Diserens for their 2022/23 Digital Residency.

# data[].attributes.subject
material form research - (other ways to listen) -  cassette - Upstream Ensemble, an aqueous sound piece initiated and composed by field recordist and artist Pablo Diserens for their 2022/23 Digital Residency.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A digital organism for decentralized research and knowledge sharing through the lens of the Ocean.

# data[].attributes.body
Weather report

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chris Watson – Weather report – Soundohm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After working with Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, Watson became a sound recordist for the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He has since joined a film and video production company…

# data[].attributes.headline
Chris Watson - Weather Report (2003) [FULL ALBUM]

# data[].attributes.subject
Chris Watson - Weather Report (2003) [FULL ALBUM]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chris Watson - Weather Report (2003) [FULL ALBUM]

# data[].attributes.headline
Water Ontologies -or, how can we learn new ways to sense and define the relations between humans, non-humans and water

# data[].attributes.subject
Water Ontologies -or, how can we learn new ways to sense and define the relations between humans, non-humans and water

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A digital organism for decentralized research and knowledge sharing through the lens of the Ocean.

# data[].attributes.headline
And Tomorrow And presents a demanding cacophony of voices questioning our collective futures. Ecological disaster, inter-species collaboration, cyborgian manifestations – from these new and altered states, artists consider differing formulations of futures.

# data[].attributes.subject
And Tomorrow And presents a demanding cacophony of voices questioning our collective futures. Ecological disaster, inter-species collaboration, cyborgian manifestations – from these new and altered states, artists consider differing formulations of futures.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
And Tomorrow And presents a demanding cacophony of voices questioning our collective futures. Ecological disaster, inter-species collaboration, cyborgian manifestations - from these new and altered states, artists consider differing formulations of futures.

The exhibition is not a static presentation but an attempt to articulate competing, collective and vibrant voices on the concept of futures. For the first time in Index' history, the exhibition model has been inverted. Educational practices, based around working dialogues with young people, have crafted and formed the exhibition, rather than as a secondary process. As part of this process, the exhibition continually develops during the three-month period, with an accumulation and archive of text based pieces. The material manifestation of the space acts as a set of pedagogical tools, reflecting on and supporting the learning processes that run throughout the exhibition.

Evolving out of conversations and activities with teenagers around the concept of futures, the exhibition And Tomorrow And talks about the role of contemporary art practices to make possible new scenarios for the future. Currently, in the minds of many young people in Sweden, the idea of the future raises anxiety levels as people experience the dramatic escalation of climate change alongside new political realities. This conversation on the role of contemporary art practice in proposing new horizons, has been developing through the Index Learning Program for the past three years with support from Arvsfonden. The breadth of the topics discussed within the exhibition refers to the breadth of interests and concerns presented by the young people central to the Index Learning Program. Drawing on the legacy of the artistic manifesto as a means of making demands of the future, the exhibition was developed with young artists who participated in the 10-day summer course And Forever And.

And Tomorrow And is an attempt to understand the role of artists in proposing distinctive and livable futures, to act as a counter point to the dominant ideals of the so-called Anthropocene. Within the exhibition, artists both emerging and established, have the ability to suggest and demand different futures, to come together and in the friction of this situation, develop new models for futuring.

Index has worked with young people to radically redefine the role of pedagogy and education within an art institution. Starting with the idea of dialogue and curiosity, and an open-ended methodology, Index Learning Program has built an internationally recognized working method which utilises dialogic and socially engaged art practices for 'thinking-with' (Donna Haraway) contemporary art.

The exhibition presents a daily looping film program from internationally established artists such as Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson, Institute for New Feeling and Jenna Sutela. The film program pays tribute to Afro-Futurists and Eco-Sexualists, ruminates on apocalypticism and science-fiction aesthetics, and rewrites the form of the manifesto in unforeseen ways. Throughout the exhibition there will be evening screenings and talks, including feature length Water Makes Us Wet by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, The Otolith Group's Hydra Decapita and Fabrizio Terranova's documentary Donna Haraway: Stories for Earthly Survival.

With video works and manifestos by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja, Institute for New Feeling, Jenna Sutela, Jess Johnson and Simon Ward, Kati Roover, Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, Soda_Jerk, Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea, The Otolith Group, and Fabrizio Terranova with Donna Haraway.

With texts and performances by summer course participants Saga Flodman, Viola Flø Brøther, Miriam Gustavsson, Leonora Haag, Evelina Jacobson Potenciano, Moa Elvira Lundborg, Leo Silkeberg W-O and Mathilda Tönseth.

Exhibition Curator: Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris
Exhibition Producer: Emmeli Person

Public Program

Sun 26 August, 19:00, Screening and talk: Storytelling for Earthly Survival with Marabouparken Konsthall
Kati Roover, Coexistence (2017, 17 min) and Fabrizio Terranova: Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016, 90 min)

Seminar

The Urge, The Echo - Reverberations of Learning Practices is a two-day seminar at Index. Using the metaphor of echoes and reverberations, the seminar will unpack learning and critical pedagogy practices collectively. The seminar is a roundtable situation for educators, artists, theorists, writers and cultural critics to gather and 'think-with' these expansive practices. Working against traditional seminar formats where knowledge is 'banked', this will be a roundtable learning process, where all participants are both student and teacher.

Further information

To read more about the learning program and the processes of making this exhibition, read an interview between the Index team here.

This exhibition is generously supported by Arvsfonden.
Index is supported by Kulturrådet, Stockholms Stad and Stockholms Läns Landsting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Exhibition: AND TOMORROW AND / Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
And Tomorrow And presents a demanding cacophony of voices questioning our collective futures. Ecological disaster, inter-species collaboration, cyborgian manifestations - from these new and altered states, artists consider differing formulations of futures. The exhibition is not a static presentation but an attempt to articulate competing, collective and vibrant voices on the concept of futures.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one's own thoughts, imagination, and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.

Inherently collaborative, the first published Deep Listening scores and activities (Sonic Meditations, 1971) were workshopped in the context of a female-identified collective, the fem-ensemble, over a period of many months. From the 1980s onwards, Deep Listening workshops, retreats, and the Deep Listening Certification Program were developed and facilitated in close partnership with playwright IONE (also Oliveors' life partner) and movement artist Heloise Gold. Today, the philosophy and practice of Deep Listening continues to evolve through a growing international community of listeners.

Pauline Oliveros on Deep Listening

" What Is Deep Listening?

For me Deep Listening is a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is.

Deep Listening is a practice consisting of listening and sounding exercises and pieces I and others have composed since 1970. The results are processed by group discussions in workshops and retreats. Deep Listening is for musicians as well as participants from other disciplines and interests. Previous musical training is not required.

The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening - listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.

We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.

Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans."

Excerpt from "Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (To Practice Practice)" by Pauline Oliveros. SoundArtArchive, December 1999.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one's own thoughts, imagination, and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.

# data[].attributes.body
Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Surrounding You

-it thinks as it touches

-so it reacts as it touches

-you become one of the tentacles that has experienced something and has sort of spread

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Surrounding You - Artist Portrait - Bonnefanten, Maastricht

# data[].attributes.headline
Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Surrounding You 

# data[].attributes.subject
Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Surrounding You 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Surrounding You - Artist Portrait - Bonnefanten, Maastricht

# data[].attributes.headline
Laure Prouvost has imagined a liquid and tentacular environment, questioning who we are, where we come from and where we are going.

# data[].attributes.subject
Laure Prouvost has imagined a liquid and tentacular environment, questioning who we are, where we come from and where we are going.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For her project for the French Pavilion, Laure Prouvost has imagined a liquid and tentacular environment, questioning who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Tinged with utopia and surrealism, the project discloses an escapist journey, both tangible and imaginary, towards an ideal elsewhere. The exhibition takes the form of an invitation to melt into the different unveiled and shared realities intermingling here, and challenges the representation of a fluid and globalized world, made of exchanges, connectivity, and discrepancies.

In the continuation of her artistic practice, which intertwines representations of desire, oneirism, and a fantasized description of nature, Laure Prouvost focuses on language, word play, and translation. The attention given to her environment and to the natural and human elements that surround her calls to mind the immersive quality of her films, installations, objects, drawings, and tapestries. The contexts of Venice-a floating city built on water and by water, a city of facade and backstage-and of the Biennale, through the notion of representation, both appear as sources of inspiration.

The cornerstone of Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre is a fictional film. It takes the form of an initiatory journey filmed over the course of a road trip on horseback through France-from the Parisian suburbs to the northern region, from the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval to the Mediterranean Sea-and, finally, to Venice. A sculptural installation, taking as a metaphorical point the trajectory of the octopus goes beyond the film, transcending out of the realms of the Pavilion and beyond. It uses typical processes of the artist's practice such as leftover objects from the film, resin, clay, glass, plants or water vapor, and features performances interacting with the architecture and the objects. Lâchons les chevaux Et avec vous on tombera des nues.

A monograph published with Flammarion accompanies the exhibition, taking the form of an atlas exploring and deepening Laure Prouvost's artistic practice. Writers include: Ahu Antmen, Andrew Berardini, Yang Beichen, Massimiliano Gioni, Martha Kirszenbaum, Dean Kissick, Annabelle Ténèze.

The French Pavilion is produced by Institut français, in close collaboration with the Ministry for Europe and Foreign affairs and the Ministry of Culture. The executive production is managed by ARTER.

With the support of CHANEL Fund for Women in the Arts and Culture.

And in partnership with ARTER, La Fondation des Artistes; Les Abattoirs, Musée - FRAC Occitanie Toulouse; LaM - Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut; Dunes Productions; Cité internationale des arts; Galerie Nathalie Obadia; carlier | gebauer; Lisson Gallery; The Art Newspaper France.

Laure Prouvost was born in Profond near Hauterive. She now lives in her "deep see blue" caravan galloping towards Venice. Along the way, she will through herself in the air, through the cracks of the waves. Fallen from the nudes she received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme, and received the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2011). She was awarded the Turner Prize (2013). Major solo exhibitions include: AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON at MUHKA, Antwerp (2019); Ring, Sing and Drink for Trespassing at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2016); Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2015); New Museum, New York (2014) to name a few. Laure Prouvost is represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, carlier | gebauer, Lisson Gallery.

Martha Kirszenbaum was born in Vitry-sur-Seine (France) in 1983. She is a curator and writer based in Paris and Los Angeles. She graduated from Sciences Po in Paris and Columbia University in New York. She founded and directed Fahrenheit by FLAX in Los Angeles, and previously worked at the New Museum and MoMA in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has organised exhibitions, screenings, performances and talks at renowned international institutions, and contributed to several publications and art magazines.

Press contacts:
Brunswick Arts frenchpavilion [​at​] brunswickgroup.com
Institut français, Jean-François Guéganno, Director of communications and sponsorship jeanfrancois.gueganno [​at​] institutfrancais.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre - Announcements - e-flux

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Laure Prouvost, Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre // May 11-November 24, 2019

# data[].attributes.headline
'we try to touch and understand our environment more' 

# data[].attributes.subject
'we try to touch and understand our environment more' 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Private View: Laure Prouvost and Martha Kirszenbaum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The French provocateur wades through notions of national identity in her oceanic exhibition at the Venice Biennale

# data[].attributes.headline
Francesca Mariano's eclectic performance project lingers around self-discovery and hydro-feminist agency. In the wreckage of the environmental crisis fluidity is a method of radical collectivity and the artist attempts to reach this dimension through post-modern juxtapositions of human-made and machine-created sounds and vibrations.

# data[].attributes.subject
Francesca Mariano's eclectic performance project lingers around self-discovery and hydro-feminist agency. In the wreckage of the environmental crisis fluidity is a method of radical collectivity and the artist attempts to reach this dimension through post-modern juxtapositions of human-made and machine-created sounds and vibrations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Francesca Mariano's eclectic performance project lingers around self-discovery and hydro-feminist agency. In the wreckage of the environmental crisis fluidity is a method of radical collectivity and the artist attempts to reach this dimension through post-modern juxtapositions of human-made and machine-created sounds and vibrations. Water and myths as cultural references and methods serve the artistic research and intent to set the basis for a fluid, counter-narrative of body agency and in the era of machines and other intelligences. Also known as Serpentine Dance, Francesca takes cue from her somatic therapy expertise to expand her music practice to a body movement, physical dimension

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Francesca Mariano, in art Francesca Heart or Serpentine Dance, delves deep into computer music and shells vibrations: a cyborg nymph at the crossroads of sound and body performance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who remembers the waterfall that stopped, the rapids that grew silent? When the exploitation of the rivers in Norrbotten began on an industrial scale in the early 1900s, their natural movements were manipulated with embankments and concrete dams. Around the same period, artists from the south travelled to Sápmi to paint rapids and waterfalls.

In the essay film, "In Memory of a River", Anja Örn reflects on the price of the wealth generated by water in motion. She turns to nature scenes in art history to find documentation of the lost waters that were used to build the nation, and which have also become an archive of memories. Who portrayed the river, whose gaze has shaped our collective memory?

"In Memory of a River" (12.40 min) is one of a total of 373 new acquisitions that constitute the museum's extensive project "Swedish Acquisitions 2021".
From 2 April 2024 the documentary "Killing Time" (2011) by Kent Klich is showing in the Mini cinema.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anja Örns "In Memory of a River" in the Mini Cinema | Moderna Museet i Stockholm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the essay film "In Memory of a River", artist Anja Örn looks to nature scenes in art history to find documentation of the lost waters that were used to build the Swedish nation during the early 1900s. See "In Memory of a River" in the Mini cinema on floor 2.

# data[].attributes.headline
In her sound work Wind (Tuuli – Vind), the Korpo-based artist Renja Leino makes tangible the constant presence and significance of the sea wind in the archipelago environment. Leino’s commissioned work consists of a collection of stories told by the islanders about their experiences of the wind.

# data[].attributes.subject
In her sound work Wind (Tuuli – Vind), the Korpo-based artist Renja Leino makes tangible the constant presence and significance of the sea wind in the archipelago environment. Leino’s commissioned work consists of a collection of stories told by the islanders about their experiences of the wind.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In her sound work Wind ( Tuuli - Vind), the Korpo-based artist Renja Leino makes tangible the constant presence and significance of the sea wind in the archipelago environment. Leino's commissioned work consists of a collection of stories told by the islanders about their experiences of the wind. They capture the way that natural phenomena, changes in the weather and the climate have a greater effect on the everyday lives of the islanders than they do on urban communities. The stories flow smoothly, between and across two languages, Swedish and Finnish, just like the daily life of the archipelago.

During the summer 2011, the sound work could be listened to on the radio frequency 95.9 MHz as you entered the archipelago on the first ferry. It was also played in Utö lighthouse, and has since been acquired as a permanent installation situated inside the lighthouse.

"The wind is an element that surrounds us all the time. It is a fundamental element here in the archipelago. Something that has always existed, always been here. There are 37 participants (between 7 and 83 years of age) in this piece, who all relate their own personal experiences, thoughts and anecdotes about the wind. There's a whole spectrum of life and knowledge in these stories, often with a philosophical resonance. Someone who has lived on an island her entire life has seen the seasons change maybe 70-80 times. There is so much depth in that knowledge." - Renja Leino interviewed by Lotta Petronella.

Wind was commissioned by CAA as part of the exhibition Contemporary Art Archipelago (2011). The sound work is presented as part of a series of events Ecology of Change that revisits the exhibition that was realised as part of Turku 2011 European Capital of Culture programme a decade ago. The series is supported by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.

Read more about Renja Leino's work online.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Renja Leino, Wind - CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago is a curatorial collective supporting site-sensitive artistic work at the intersection of ecological, feminist and decolonial enquiries.

# data[].attributes.headline
Developed in collaboration with Boonwurrung Elder N’arweet Carolyn Briggs, Watershed is an essay and audio recording that delves into the deep history of Melbourne’s waterways.

# data[].attributes.subject
Developed in collaboration with Boonwurrung Elder N’arweet Carolyn Briggs, Watershed is an essay and audio recording that delves into the deep history of Melbourne’s waterways.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Cass Lynch is a Noongar writer and researcher living on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Perth. She has recently completed a creative writing PhD that explores deep memory features of the Noongar oral storytelling tradition; in particular stories that reference the last ice age and the rise in sea level that followed it. Her Noongar language haikus, published in Westerly 64.1, won the 2019 Patricia Hackett Prize. Her story 'Split', a creative impression of deep time Perth, can be found in 'Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now' by UQP.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cass Lynch is a Noongar writer and researcher living on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Perth. She has recently completed a creative writing PhD that explores deep memory features of the Noongar oral storytelling tradition; in particular stories that reference the last ice age and the rise in sea level that followed it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
rīvus: a glossary of water is a 572-page book published to accompany the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. It's described on the biennale's website as 'a substantial publication presented as an artist book, a scholarly reference and a beautiful object'. It costs $79.95 before postage. It's also accompanied by a Spotify playlist. In a one-page introduction the editors write that the book is an 'aquatic artefact, it expresses intended meanings in terms of the nature of the entries it brings to print'. I count 93 terms, ordered alphabetically, and over 150 colour images. The colophon tells us the book is printed on reclaimed paper, 'salvaged from waste stock before it is recycled, saving energy and water from the environment'. It's heavy, as you would expect, and its spine is exposed and dyed blue, revealing the binding. It opens nicely, without cracking. The book is an ambitious attempt not to represent, record or explain the works in the exhibition - which features 89 participants, including eight rivers, with each venue conceived as a 'conceptual wetland' - but to invite (again from the editors) 'creative submergences into water's knotted and rippling figurative, material, and aesthetic modalities'.

What happens, in that moment of encounter, when a book states its intention, pre-empting the act of reading it? This question intends to make a little room to consider the relationship between book and exhibition, between writing and art, between reading and looking, and, if I can get there, between what is presented to us when we engage with large exhibitions and their books, and what we actually need, or desire, during that engagement. I also ask this question with an appreciation for the enormous labour that goes into making books like this. The care and attention they demand; the many sets of eyes that pass over their pages; the considerable desk-and-screen-time; the schedules and budgets; the image lists; the typographical tinkering; the emails and phone calls; the corrections upon corrections; the logistics of print and freight; the waiting; and the doubts and questions that linger somewhere in the margins, invisible but present.

Any book is the culmination of a set of decisions. Most books pass through stages that have been decided in advance, regardless of subject or content. A seasoned editor working for a global art publisher once told me that a lot of books are just like bathplugs or bathroom fittings. He was suggesting I loosen up, not take the book I was working on so seriously. It's your job to make another bathplug, he said over a beer, not to invent a new device for blocking water from going down the drain. Bathplug books, to extend his analogy, can be found in almost every museum shop, not far from the dangling trinkets and colourful socks. Open these books and you'll find glossy colour images and short captions. When they take the form of exhibition catalogues, you'll see a brief note from the director of the museum up front followed by a dutiful catalogue essay by the curator. Such writing has a habit of coming across as though it were written to be written, not read. In what might once have been a vehicle for the exhibition to travel beyond a museum's walls or record the coming together of different artworks and their stories, such books (if they are made at all) often seem to function as justifications for the exhibition itself or the works on show, or more simply merchandise that the museum feels it's obliged to produce.

Are museums worried we won't get what they're up to, I sometimes wonder? Do they fret that we'll miss what's most important about a collection of works? Contemporary art is an anxious space of production, and that anxiousness is often amplified by a museum's ego defence: rationalisation. New buildings are built, rebranded, but what changes take place inside? As I learnt recently, in one of Sydney's major institutions, museum guards are prohibited from talking with the public about the art they mind. What a missed opportunity! What is this nervousness, if it is nervousness? And how does this seep into the writing and reading that occurs alongside the art? What a difference it makes when a wall text doesn't begin with 'this work is about...', my friend once said, but instead begins with a small detail about the material, the making, how the work came to be. Bewildering terminology blocks curiosity, while explanation extinguishes attention. As John Berger pointedly wrote way back in 1966: 'Anybody who is not an expert entering the average museum today is made to feel like a cultural pauper receiving charity, whilst the phenomenal sales of fifth-rate art books reflect the consequent belief in Self-Help'. Berger was writing against handling artworks as property (handling knowledge as property, too), and he called for an imaginative effort to free art from mystique. Let's see artworks as living things, he might say, rather than 'finished achievements'.

Books like rīvus aspire to the incompleteness of the artwork, or at least consciously depart from what George Kubler once called 'the stock-taking' convention of art history. The exhibition catalogue as we know it inherited nineteenth-century conventions regarding the categorisation of artworks, whereby art is slotted into a concept or argument, or made to perform for a single interpretation, just as art historians and anthropologists have historically sought to neatly organise objects and images into styles and movements. This biennale's emphasis on artworks as unfinished and embedded in ongoing, situated and different knowledge systems and struggles is an exciting proposition. The curators have sought to include, in the exhibition and the book (see the entry on 'Rights'), a variety of Indigenous-led movements involved in successfully affording rights to rivers and other waterways as living entities under different constitutions (see, for instance, Whanganui river in Aotearoa/New Zealand; the Ausangate in Peru; the Atrato River in Colombia; or the Yarra River in Victoria). The anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena uses the term 'earth-beings' to describe such objects, sentient beings that do not reside in but are soil, rivers or mountains. Writing about the ways in which these beings demand a reconfiguration of what has historically been partitioned, de la Cadena reveals some of the ways that earth-beings, recognised as having personhood, become 'contentious because their presence in politics disavows the separation between "Nature" and "Humanity", on which the political theory our world abides by was historically funded'. Informed by conversations with runakuna or Quechua people living mostly in and near the Andean Mountains, she argues for a 'pluraversal politics' where nature becomes public as a complex multiplicity, and where conflicting views co-exist. If the image of a single, unified world works in tandem with a politics that is based on a tradition of partitions and allocations (not to mention dispossessions and violations) then a multiplicity of worlds accepts 'ontological pluralisation' as its program. Here, plurality is different to its more familiar meaning within identity politics, describing instead a multiplicity of worlds that do not close but remain open, partially connected over, say, a river.

It is, perhaps, partially for this reason, that rīvus the exhibition seems uncomfortable with the closed format of the biennale, insisting on sustainability not as concept but as practice. Wherever possible, the exhibition incorporates reusable materials, such as the metal scaffolding that holds up the screens in the venues, or of course the reclaimed paper that the glossary of water is printed on. Book and exhibition therefore pose an important question as to the viability of such activities even as they recreate them. A note from the editors at the back of the book makes this point: 'It is full of histories and images related to rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, but is not the catalogue of the exhibition, as it not only unpacks issues related to it but also expands well beyond the scope of the show'. There is no reason to doubt this book is a reflection of 'a lifelong interest in rivers and other bodies of water and the ecologies they sustain', as the editors write, as well as the many Indigenous ways of knowing and caring for rivers and waterways that it presents, but books can easily escape the aims of their makers, just like artworks and exhibitions can get away from an artist or a curator (not necessarily a bad thing, as the editor of this review reminded me). The works are made, the exhibition is planned and installed, the texts are written and edited, the book is printed, but something just doesn't happen. Why? Does the pressure to produce a spectacular object or event undermine its communicative potential? Trust is the glue that binds what is offered to what's received; trust in the act of looking and reading, and what may or may not follow from that trust. What comes to be known by those deeply invested in a subject is rarely, if ever, truly present in how it appears. Exhibitions and books always take a different form from their object of study, and this seems acutely apparent when our attention and imagination is asked to consider all things water. As D. Graham Burnett wrote in his mammoth book on whales and whaling in the twentieth century, 'if it is whales you want, you have to go to the sea.'

It was a cold and stormy day when I visited the different exhibition sites of rīvus with a friend, an artist. She wondered aloud why certain spaces worked and others didn't. For her, the skill of curation is in its disappearance, like a trick the curator's hand vanishes, letting the artworks speak: for themselves, with other artworks, and to the person looking and listening. This is a difficult skill to describe or define. Luck surely plays a role. When something does happen, you might find yourself in a conversation about the work in front of you, but it will likely not be conceptual (the most expedient way to kill a conversation about art, in my experience, are again those deadening words: 'this work is about...'). Can the same be said of a book and the act of reading? What books on your shelf do you open and fall into? What books take you directly into their warmth? Like artworks, words either lead us into or away from things, 'like a fragile makeshift bridge', wrote Italo Calvino, 'cast across the void'. Sometimes, I fantasise that all publishing could operate like cartonera books do in Buenos Aires (and other Latin American countries). These books began in the wake of the financial crash of 2001, when artists and writers sought to create a different model for collaborative publishing outside the logic of the market. Cartonera books contain either unpublished content (from both known and unknown authors) or photocopies of previously published material, and are bound together from recycled cardboard bought from cartoneros - 'cardboarders' - and then hand-painted and sold on the street at the cost of production. What is made is made to be read, passed on, shared, and read again. My friend from those parts sends me pictures of these books from time to time. Their colourful painted covers, honest and direct, are more compelling than any design I see in bookstores. The last photo she texted me was from a bus, the latest book in her lap. Two orange, cat-like eyes stare out at me, painted on cardboard. It's the latest story, she writes, ordered and made like a pizza!

Later, when I get home, I cook dinner and turn to the pages of the glossary; a collation of information, poetry, myth, theory, fiction. A is for Aab, the Farsi word for water, a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad; for Absorption, on the waterways of lutruwita (Tasmania) by Julie Gough; B is for Barka, or Baaka (also known as the Darling River) by Barkandji elder Badger Bates; for Bayou; for Biophony; for Bioplastic; C is for Canal, a poem by Brandy Nālani McDougall; for Casiquiare; for Chthulucene (compound the Greek khthōn and kainos) by Donna Haraway; there are entries on Interspecies Collaboration; on Mimesis and Moon Tides; on Phosphorescence and Puddle; Rewilding; Sounding and Splitting Water; on the Tank Stream, the former fresh water tributary of Sydney Cove that was modified by settlers using Indian vernacular technology, and by 1826 was an open sewer, and much much more. As I read, changing fonts jumble the eye, and I find myself thinking, what if design played less of a role? What if the book let go of its beauty and wore its salvaged biography more comfortably? Would I sink further into the languages (and knowledges) of water? Because, earlier that day, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe's acrylic paintings on handmade mulberry paper seemed to almost sing - with their simple forms, the pleasure they took in colour, and the vitality of their expression in a language I didn't know - I went looking for the artist in the glossary. Under 'Flood', page 202, I find a story in Hakihiiwe's voice, as told to Luis Romero. It's a sad and beautiful story about drought, thunder, rain and flooding in the Parawa/Orinoco river, which runs from the Guiana highlands in South America to the Atlantic Ocean. The works, too, are reproduced in colour. But something is missing. The story, it seems to me, has been swallowed by the book. The powerful smallness of it overdressed.

It may seem odd to focus on the form the book takes, and not simply its content, but the two are always entwined, like an artwork. One shapes the other. I go looking for that word- rīvus- and find it on page 427. Water and conflict. Rivers and legal regimes. The entry reads like the spark of the exhibition and the book: 'Words carry suppressed and forgotten meanings and are laden with histories', I read. The word river comes from the Latin rīpa, roots in Proto-Indo-European, 'to scratch, tear, cut'. ' Rīvus, meaning a brook or stream, gave birthto the word rīvālis, which evokes a primal moment in time when sharing the waters quickly turned into a confrontation'. It goes on: 'Another meaning of rīvālis was 'those who share the same lover'. We are all bodies of water, as is the planet where we dwell; shall we ever learn to share the loving caress of the precious liquid that is us?' This paragraph is the book that wants to be read, I think. When I sit down to write the review, I know it'll be difficult, because the book is caught between wanting to be a serious resource in a time of colliding ecological calamities, a multi-vocal re-imagining of environmental ethics and, despite what it says, a catalogue. It ends up somewhere in the middle. This is neither good nor bad; its proposition is to rethink what's expected from large-scale exhibitions and their accompanying books, and that contraflow can't be done with a single work, exhibition or book. The book, in this sense, may be an artefact of its own struggle to contend with institutional and publishing conventions. Maybe there are photocopies and scanned PDFs of sections of the glossary of water already in distribution, for students who can't afford it? Maybe the curators of the next biennale or large-scale exhibition will take the questions posed by the book, knowingly and unknowingly, and extend them into their work? I ask all this without shirking my own responsibility in the matter. I once saw a note stuck to the wall above a librarian's desk, a Latin saying, which the librarian kindly translated: 'According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny'. They are, in this sense, always unfinished.

Works Cited

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
B is for Book | Tom Melick on rīvus: A Glossary of Water

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What happens, in that moment of encounter, when a book states its intention, pre-empting the act of reading it?

# data[].attributes.headline
The Rivers Sing with Deborah Cheetham AO and Daniel Browning. 

# data[].attributes.subject
The Rivers Sing with Deborah Cheetham AO and Daniel Browning. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
RISING 2021 Podcast: The Rivers Sing with Deborah Cheetham AO and Daniel Browning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mahmood FazalDeborah Cheetham AODaniel Browning

# data[].attributes.headline
thinking with the river ~ The Darling River, Australia’s third largest river, and the surrounding area are home to many different plants and animals, such as yabbies, shrimps, fish, mussels, turtles, birds and old River Red Gums. These animals and plants have been an important food source for the Barkandji people, who have relied on the Barka’s interconnected ecosystem.

# data[].attributes.subject
thinking with the river ~ The Darling River, Australia’s third largest river, and the surrounding area are home to many different plants and animals, such as yabbies, shrimps, fish, mussels, turtles, birds and old River Red Gums. These animals and plants have been an important food source for the Barkandji people, who have relied on the Barka’s interconnected ecosystem.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
AGSA - The Art Gallery of South Australia

# data[].attributes.body
thinking about listening as a form of connection

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sherkin Island

Sherkin Sounds and the Surrounds will represent, and present, the views, rich history, and ongoing issues affecting the West Cork island community. Off-shore island communities around Ireland face similar challenges. This is part of the Grassroots Radio Project

Sherkin Sounds and Surrounds's tracks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sherkin Sounds and the Surrounds will represent, and present, the views, rich history, and ongoing issues affecting the West Cork island community. Off-shore island communities around Ireland face similar challenges. This is part of the Grassroots Radio Project

# data[].attributes.headline
Inspired by the watery edges of Barry in South Wales, SWAY is devoted to exploring the potential of intertidal thinking with artists, curators, researchers, writers and residents

# data[].attributes.subject
Inspired by the watery edges of Barry in South Wales, SWAY is devoted to exploring the potential of intertidal thinking with artists, curators, researchers, writers and residents

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Miriam Simun / New York, NY, USA - Jan 07, 2019

Training Transhumanism is an open-sourced web-based instructional video series for training human enhancement based on the model of a cephalopod. Each video will instruct one exercise of the Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) psycho-physical regimen for human enhancement in the face of rapid ecological and technological change, developed in collaboration with luciana achugar. Exercises train new sensitivities and capabilities, focusing on embodied intelligence, shape-shifting (camouflage) and distributed intelligence. Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) positions a non-mammalian animal as an evolutionary role model (rather than a machine); embraces the capacities residing in the biological human body and the pleasures rooted in bodily labors; advocates for embodied knowledge for the project of innovation; and embraces training as a technology is rooted in practice, development of internal abilities, and equity in access.

1
Welcome to cephalopod
evolution

Miriam Simun

Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) is a PSYCHO- PHYSICAL training regimen for human evolution {{enhancement, extension, transformation}} in the face of rapid ecological and technological change. A series of exercises train new sensitivities and capabilities within the existing human biological system, based on the #role-model-organism# of the cephalopod. The regimen focuses on the internal capacity building of three key cephalopodic traits within the human: embodied and tactile intelligence, shape-shifting camouflage and distributed intelligence.

Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) was developed at the MIT Media Lab (aka the future factory) by Miriam Simun in collaboration with luciana achugar.

2
transhumanist dreams

#trainingtranshumanism {{{transhumanism:: the physical, psychological and emotional enhancement of the human}}} not through augmentation or implantation but through TRAINING, LABOR, BODY-WORK.

The literal definition for transhuman is " beyond human." Another definition describes the enhancement of humans' physical, cognitive and emotional abilities. For the last half-century, transhumanism has come to be understood as a vision for the future of the human that melds human and machine. Heavily influenced by science fiction and currently heralded by silicon valley, popular transhumanist projects attempt to upload the brain to the Internet, end death, enhance cognition through neurobiological intervention and artificial intelligence, and generally and push beyond the limits of human capacity with technology.

Miriam Simun

A primary goal of many transhumanists is to convince the public that embracing radical technology and science is in the species' best interest. The ultimate melding of "man and machine." [1]

"Posthumanism is a description of a new form of human existence in which the boundaries between humans and nature and humans and machines are blurred, as well as a prescription for an ideal situation in which the limitations of human biology are transcended, replaced by machines. The transition from the human condition to the posthuman condition will be facilitated by transhumanism, the project of human enhancement that will ultimately yield the transformation of the human species from the human to the posthuman. As an intellectual movement, transhumanism is still very small, but transhumanist ideas exert deep and broad influence on contemporary culture and society...[I] argue that it should be seen as a secularist faith: transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance." [2]

Worship of technology. A quick image search renders the preceding images - the melding of man with machine (and one woman). Data storage, wireless brain-to-device interaction, implanted error correction devices...the predominant model for the future of the human is a computing machine.

While "solving" death and discarding with my body do not reside high on my agenda, the enhancement of capability is a worthy endeavor, and certainly one we need to contend with all these futures.
But I don't want to become a machine.

3
What do you want?

I WANT.

I WANT TO BECOME.
I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD.
{{{ #allthewaysintobecoming }}} We are agents of our own evolution... but what is the model according to which we operate?

Embedded in all projects of innovation are the grains of desire, of vision, of ideology - explicit or not. This transhumanist project begins with a declaration of desire.

The future(s) we propose are the future(s) we desire.

Miriam Simun

4
training
as technology
This attempt at becoming requires the use of a technology rooted in bodily labors: training.
The Merriam-Webster's dictionary offers a definition of the term technology: "the use of science in industry, engineering, etc., to invent useful things or to solve problems and a machine, piece of equipment, method, etc., that is created by technology." In 1937, the American sociologist Read Bain wrote that "technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them." [3] The US Patent department enables the patenting of objects but also processes: methods are also understood to be technologies.

Training is a method of producing a new kind of human, out of an old one. We train pilots, astronauts, soldiers. We train trainers. We develop methods and processes in order to produce biological organisms with new capabilities. These trainings are also a technology.

Training, as opposed to devices, is a technology that requires a different kind of resource investment: of time and of labor - not simply of capital. Training does not [have to] require expensive gadgets, material goods, the newest devices. Training requires labor, diligence, commitment and effort.

Miriam Simun

In this way, training as technology - if wielded in thoughtful ways - can encourage equity in access. Certainly, time is a valuable resource, and hard to come by - but fundamentally - time can be made where capital and access to material technologies can not. Training is about making-do with what one has and making it better, through labor, through commitment, through effort: through sweat.

#rolemodelspecies

Cephalopods are the class of marine mollusks that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus. They have been in existence for over 400 million years.

Miriam Simun

"Cephalopods - especially octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid - have a special importance. These animals are an independent experiment in the evolution of large and complex nervous systems - in the biological machinery of the mind. They evolved this machinery on a historical lineage distinct from our own. Where their minds differ from ours, they show us another way of being a sentient organism, writes Peter Godfrey- Smith in Other Minds." [4]

Another way of being, another way of seeing, another way of feeling, another way of responding, another way of perceiving, another way of being, of being, of being...

5
embodied + tactile
intelligence

"The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in touch, in ways that enable response-ability."

- Karen Barad [5]

Embodied cognition is a thinking that occurs in relation to the world. It is an understanding and intelligence that occurs fundamentally in relation to a specific context. It thus requires - and is shaped by - our physical bodies and the physical, real- world environment. It is where all intelligence emerged from, and the site to which human intelligence remains tethered.

To understand intelligence as fundamentally tied to perceptive and action-based abilities that reside in our bodies.

This position presents us with an entirely other set of possibilities for intelligence and action in the world.

The cephalopod as model explores the radical extreme of embodied cognition and intelligence - neural-cognitive processes literally occurring in what we vertebrates term the "peripheral" body parts. The cephalopod represents a radical example of neurobiology - decision making with the body, without involving the 'main' brain. [6]

As Mather and Kuba describe:

"The arm contains a widespread sensory system that allows the animal to collect mechanical and chemical information from the immediate environment and to appropriately react to the stimuli." [7]

Said another way by Godfrey-Smith: "In the octopus, the motions are guided by the arm's own chemical and tactile sensors, not by vision." [8] It is the arm itself that makes decisions, based on its embodied understanding of the world.

"Cephalopods have large nervous systems...as many as two-thirds of these neurons are dedicated to the nerve cords and ganglia in the peripheral nervous system (PNS)

Miriam Simun

rather than the central nervous system ..." [9] Not only is their cognitive processes localized, it is highly sensorial:"...a significant portion of the central nervous system in cephalopods is dedicated to visual, tactile, and chemosensory perception." [10]

IF
{it is in large part this intimate, fuzzy and malleable relation of mind/body/environment in the cephalopod that has enabled it to survive millennia, adapting to an ever- changing environment.}
THEN
{developing and improving a thinking in humans that listens to our body and occurs in relation to our environment will develop our awareness, understanding, concern and resiliency of/for/in our surroundings; environment; ecology. The ecological crisis will only intensify if we continue to solely foreground non-situated cognition to address ecological concerns.
To stimulate our tactile capacities. To heighten our embodied sensitivities.

These cognitive enhancements will provide us with new sensations, new awarenesses, new relations to the world, each other, and ourselves. As luciana achugar lays out "a more connected, more sensational relation" to the world.

6
shapeshifting
camouflage

Cephalopods can change color, texture, shape and even mimic other organisms' movement patterns. They do this largely in order to avoid detection by predators and prey, and as a form of signaling - communicating with each other.

The malleability of representation of which cephalopods are capable makes them very resilient creatures, able to swiftly adapt to any situation. This is one of the reasons this animal - a shell-less invertebrate, essentially a giant piece of meat swimming through the sea - has been able to propagate and succeed for millennium in an ocean full of predators.

Consider also Mather and Kuba's description of the S. sepioidea squid's evaluation of predator behavior and subsequent response in a near-shore field study:

"Different cues elicited different responses within and across species... Could the squid be "mind reading" the intention of the fish? It is more likely that they were picking up small movement or postural cues, but the necessity to do such complex evaluations suggest a heavy pressure to succeed in these calculations." [11]

Such findings show that beyond a simple color-changing camouflage capability, cephalopods practice a complex and sophisticated shapeshifting strategy for best survival. This requires an immense awareness of their physical and social environment, which they gain through highly attuned visual, tactile, and chemo-receptive sensors - as well as embodied and tactile cognition - operating both centrally and locally.

The US military is funding both biological and engineering research to better understand how cephalopod skin and their chromatophores function, in order to develop materials and tools that will enable an evolution detection-avoidance capabilities for military purposes. [12] #TrainingTranshumanism takes a broader and more holistic approach. What can we learn from the complex interactions of the shapeshifter?

We define camouflage as:

1. [A] hyper-awareness of one's hyper-local environment, and

2. [B] the ability to shape-shift - in role, behavior, identity or simply presentation - for utmost resiliency in said environment.

7
distributed intelligence

Miriam Simun

"All vertebrates share a general body-plan, and their nervous systems show a common inheritance. Cephalopods have an entirely different organization, both in body and in brain. The vertebrate plan features a head and spinal cord, with the peripheral nervous system coming off it. This is a rather centralized design. Molluscs, along with several other invertebrate groups, developed what is sometimes called a 'ladder-like' nervous system. In many molluscs there are knots of neurons, or ganglia, spread along the body, linked by two kinds of connections - 'vertical' ones along the body and 'horizontal' ones across it, like a ladder. Though this was the likely molluscan starting point, in the evolution of coleoid cephalopods there was both expansion and partial centralization of this nervous system." [13]

This distributed neural organization in means that intelligence - the ability to think and respond - is spread throughout their bodies. Different body parts can sense and act upon sensation without that information necessarily ever traveling to the 'main brain.' Even the term 'main brain' may provide an incorrect model for understanding cephalopodic intelligence. As Godfrey- Smith writes,

"In fact, the cephalopod nervous system is so decentralized that it might seem to be a mistake to even look for this kind of unified processing. They may have a radically different style of psychological organization from us." [14]

"For an octopus, its arms are party self- they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain's perspective, they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own... central guidance of the movements is never complete, and the peripheral system always has its say." [15]

Perhaps then, instead of understanding the octopus as a single organism with nine brains, we should understand it as nine organisms - housed within a single skin.

There is evidence that supports this position: Even after an arm has been severed, it can continue to hunt and catch food, attempting to feed it to a mouth no longer around. [16] Octopus researchers describe different arms as appearing to have different personalities that remain consistent over time: one arm curious, another shy. [17] Bret Grasse, cephalopod husbandry expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, tells of an octopus arm that attempted to feed itself only to have the body shoot jets of water at the arm in order to get it away. This debate continued for several minutes. [18]

"When we act, the border between self and environment is usually fairly clear. If you move your arm, for example, you control the arm both on its general path and also in many fine details of its motions. Various other objects in the environment are not under your control at all, though they can be moved indirectly by manipulating them with your limbs. Uncontrolled movements by an object around you are usually a sign that it is not part of you...If you were an octopus, these distinctions would be blurred." [19]

We train this blurriness. How might our attitudes shift if we were at times unsure if what we encounter is self or other? If we trained to be so sensitive as to inhabit another bodies' perceptions, sensations, activations inside our own bodies? "Other bodies" can include human bodies, non-human bodies, bodies of water, etc? How might our perceptions, relations, actions change?

As a vertebrate with a centralized intelligence, total distribution is impossible. Perhaps then, achieving cephalopod evolution is impossible alone. Perhaps then, the future of the human requires more than one human; to share cognition; to enter into states of shared intention; to become, for a while at least, a sort of single organism.

The distributed nervous system not only problematizes the conception of the self, but also the relationship between self and environment:

Beyond cooperation, beyond collaboration: toward a shared intention.

Our own embodiment is
never fully autonomous.
We require other bodies,
that in turn require other
bodies, to bathe us into
being. [20]

Our skin is our sensor,
also our border, holding
this jumble of physical
organs, gases, liquids, we
call the self together. But
even our skin is a membrane
- porous.

So I want you to let this sharp distinction that we
usually carry around with
us to start to blur - just
get a little fuzzy at the
edges - where fingers touch
fabric, where weight rests
on surface, where arm
brushes leg.

exercise:
allow your tips their brains

exercise:
mirror your invertebrate parts

exercise:
find new supports in mutual pressures

8
wet
training

Miriam Simun

Now Entangled, Accelerate.
Once DRY TRAINING is complete, we move onto the advanced stage of transhumanist enhancement: WET TRAINING.

This is a whole new level. For this, we will first need to understand that
YOUR URGE TO BREATHE IS A LIE.

1. Ibid.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. See Cunjiang et al, 2014, Adaptive optoelectronic camouflage systems with designs inspired by cephalopod skins and Harmon, 2014, Octopus-Inspired Camouflage Flashes To Life In Smart Material

5. Ibid.

6. Bret Grasse, Personal Conversation, April 12 2018.

In a world where people are lonelier than ever, Jennifer Katanyoutanant builds a website for the millions of mukbang fans to have online dinners with one another.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) | Akademie Schloss Solitude: Schlosspost

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Miriam Simun / New York, NY, USA - Jan 07, 2019 Training Transhumanism is an open-sourced web-based instructional video series for training human enhancement based on the model of a cephalopod. Each video will instruct one exercise of the Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) psycho-physical regimen for human enhancement in the face of rapid ecological and technological change, developed in collaboration with luciana achugar.

# data[].attributes.headline
beyond the coastline, the body confronts a qualitatively different space: fluid, mobile, liquid. 

# data[].attributes.subject
beyond the coastline, the body confronts a qualitatively different space: fluid, mobile, liquid. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is an excerpt (the first few pages) of my essay "The Oceanic Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space." This is my most Deleuzian piece yet, and a future chapter in my book in progress (tentatively entitled) Terrain: An Affective Geometry of Planet Earth.

The main protagonist in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane has been the elusive and intensely mobile oceanic space that satellites, planes, and ships have been meticulously scrutinizing in search for the plane's debris, thus far to no avail. For four weeks, the surveillance technology that is often very precise in locating objects anywhere on the planet has been struggling to pierce through the opacity of this huge mass of water that, in permanently moving, recurrently makes itself unreadable. This is a vast liquid space whose ambient thickness and intensity are in a permanent state of becoming: folding, shifting, arching, twisting; always in motion, always displacing its volume across vast distances, always indifferent to the life forms enveloped by its mobile flows. Ten days after the plane's disappearance, satellites pinpointed on the oceanic surface relatively large objects, over twenty meters long, that looked like debris from the plane . One day, however, the debris seemed to be here; the next day, it seems to be five hundred kilometers away. A lways on the move, the ocean carries anything floating on it elsewhere, particularly in the turbulent waters of the southern Indian ocean. A few days later, satellites and planes detected hundreds of smaller objects scattered over wide areas. But when finally reached by ships, these objects turned out to be part of the vast amounts of ordinary debris drifting in oceanic space, the surplus of the imperial forms of connectivity that thousands of ships loaded with commodities leave behind in the oceanic void, turned into the most decisive channel of global capitalism. The global panopticum has been disoriented by this mobile, textured, multi-layered spatiality of the ocean, which makes itself even more opaque by getting entangled with the detritus of globalization. So many transnational and imperial resources have been put in the search that debris from the plane may eventually be found. Had the plane fallen on firm land, however, the global panopticum of satelites and drones that control the atmosphere, and therefore look at the planet from high above, would have already located the debris. But the plane fell into a liquid vortex that swallows up most of the heavy objects that fall into it. This is liquid matter that, because of its physical properties, lets the force of gravity pull those objects down toward a dark abyss that the naked human body confronts as a physical environment devoid of solid ground and breathable air: the oceanic void.

We know that the ocean covers two thirds of the planet's surface. But what type of space is the ocean? One way to begin answering this question is to look at those areas where the spatiality of the ocean meets that of islands and continents. The material counterpoint between both types of spaces is apparent and seemingly self-evident. On the one hand, the beaches, mountains, or human-made buildings that define the coastline and emerge from above the oceanic surface constitute the type of spaces where the vast majority of humans are born, live, and die. These geographies are defined by a multiplicity of textures and forms but share the solid spatiality that has sustained humans as land creatures adapted over millions of years to breath, eat, move, and reproduce on firm land in direct contact with the atmosphere. On the other hand, beyond the coastline, the body confronts a qualitatively different space: fluid, mobile, liquid. This is a space whose multiplicity is subsumed to the physical properties of water: an incompressible fluid that is permanently in motion because its molecules can move relative to each other, adapting to the shape of its container, the Earth's surface, and to the forces of the atmosphere. Shorelines, in short, are among the most dramatic thresholds in human experiences of space: the point where the consistency and materiality of space abruptly changes and the body faces the beginning of a liquid world with flows, rhythms, and properties that are not those of land. Coastlines are those areas where space folds to reveal the edge of a immense liquid space, planetary in nature. In
The Clamor of Being, Badiou mentions, based on their personal correspondence, that Deleuze viewed "the edge of the void" as "the intersection between the territory and the process of deterritorialization, the dissolution of the territory in the event." On the edge of the oceanic void, the type of human spatiality that defines the territoriality of land faces the event of the ungrounding created by a liquid world.

Humans have long navigated and used oceanic space with high degrees of expertise and sophistication. Many feel at home there, at ease in that liquid, untameable world. But they do so as land creatures whose anatomy and physiology have evolved to move and breathe on firm ground. The liquid space of the ocean can very quickly envelop and asphyxiate the human bodies that venture in it without flotation devices. It is in this precise physical sense that the human body confronts the ocean as a void: as liquid matter that does not halt the pull of gravity toward the heart of the planet the way firm land does and that, in sinking the body in a fluid devoid of breathable air, negates and interrupts land-based forms of mobility and territoriality. This liquid space, in short, imposes on humans a challenging spatiality that can be socially used but cannot be fully controlled, for it follows its own, powerful rhythms. These rhythms are created by forces mobilized by a planet in motion: by the rotation of the Earth around its axis and around the sun, by the cyclical exposure of the ocean and the atmosphere to the heat of the sun, by the gravity of the moon, as well as by the friction between tectonic plates, which occasionally shake the depths of the ocean to create tsunamis. This vortex is far from being empty: it is inhabited by a pure multiplicity of intensities in motion and by a large biomass. But the ocean is a void in the physical sense of the term, simply because alone in the ocean we drown in an instant, bringing to light what we tend two take for granted: our bodily ontology as land creatures who breath air.

In this essay, I argue that Deleuze provides us concepts that are particularly important to examine the liquid spatiality of oceanic space, such as becoming, fold, multiplicity, intensity, singularity, difference, repetition, eternal return, virtual, actual, and smooth and striated space. It is especially in the analysis of the repetitive, rhythmical, and ever-fluid spatiality of the ocean that Deleuze's philosophy reveals its power to illuminate our understanding of space in its immanence, independently of human appropriations but also in relation to them. My analysis is in dialogue with authors like John Protevi and Levi Bryant, who also draw on Deleuze to think the material becoming and gravitational forces of non-human made objects and forces. And as Protevi argues, the becoming of water is particularly amenable to Deleuze's philosophy (Life, War, Earth, p. 45). Yet my analysis also goes beyond Deleuze because it puts him in dialogue with Alain Badiou by subsuming the becoming of oceanic space to a figure of negativity such as the void. This may seem like a counterintuitive move, given Deleuze's well-known hostility toward the negative and his public disagreements with Badiou. Yet I see their thinking as creatively entangled in multiple ways, and for starters I understand the void not as a figure of spatial emptiness but rather, drawing from Badiou, as a figure of pure multiplicity: that is, a multiplicity that is non-representable. The ocean's spatiality forms an immense void not because it is empty but, on the contrary, because it is a positive presence that is a productive and disruptive multiplicity of intensities, singularities, and rhythms: a vortex that voids (interrupts, negates, disrupts) the spatiality of human mobility on firm land.

My analysis of oceanic space draws from recent efforts in the humanities to examine geo-physical forces in terms of their own materiality and rhythms, without reducing them to their social appropriations by human societies. The literature on "the social construction of nature" played an important role in undermining the dualism between society and nature and in showing that society is not external to "nature." Yet this perspective often reduces "nature" to the passive, malleable background upon which active, human-centered forces operate. Phillip Steinberg's The Social Construction of the Ocean is the best book devoted to analyzing the geography of the oceans. Steinberg shows with great detail and sophistication how human societies have made use of and conceptualized the ocean in different historical periods and in different parts of the world. He demonstrates that far from being a space "empty" of sociality, the ocean has been socialized at multiple levels and is a crucial component of global currents of trade and relations of territorial power. And while the book does not examine how the liquid nature of oceanic space escapes human coding, Steinberg leaves the door open for a non-constructivist view of the ocean when he writes, at the end of his book, that this remains an important and pending question: that in being "a space of nature," some crucial dimensions of oceanic space are not reducible to their social uses, most notably the fact that "the sea never stops moving" (p. 210)

In his essay, I take this ever-mobile nature of oceanic space as my starting point. This is also a dimension that Steinberg's most recent work on oceanic spatiality is exploring (as the conversation we have in the comments below make clear). But I prefer to view the ocean not as a space of nature but as a spatial set within the terrain of planet Earth. As several authors have noted, the notion of nature is too loaded with transcendental connotations to be salvaged as a useful analytic concept, even if we add the usual disclaimers about the need to overcome the society-nature dualism. This problem is clear in the very idea that the ocean is a "natural space," for this implies that places made by humans are not natural, thereby reintroducing the distinction between society and nature that is publicly disavowed. Terrain is the absolute temporal materialization of what we abstract as "nature." Seas, mountains, roads, rivers, cities, farms, bridges, forests: they are the type of singularities that envelope our ever-fleeting bodies as part of the terrain of planet Earth. As I have argued here, I see terrain as involving all existing, three-dimensional material forms (human made or not) that are constitutive of space as we know it: that is, the tangible space of this world.
This analysis of the ocean as a spatial set within the terrain implies a materialist, object-oriented, and affective lens but more importantly a geometric eye and perception. This is why a theory of terrain demands a Spinozian sensibility built in critical dialogue with the two last philosophical titans of the world: Deleuze and Badiou. The starting principle of a theory of terrain is that of its pure material multiplicity. This means that the materiality of the terrain is not homogenous, but the opposite. Spinoza argued that the body is made up of hard, soft, and liquid elements: bones, flesh, and blood. Likewise, the planetary terrain is defined by a multiplicity of physical densities and textures, involving hard, soft, gaseous, and liquid elements engaging in different degrees of temperature. The ocean is certainly the largest expression of liquid space on Earth. Comprising over two-thirds of the surface of the planet, the oceanic void has been one of the most powerful and determining spatial forces in human history. Its most defining feature is that, for the human body, it creates the generalized ungrounding we call drowning. The history of imperial and capitalist expansion into the totality of the planet has revolved, to a great extent, around technological efforts to counter this ungrounding created by the eternal, ever-mobile becoming of liquid space.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is an excerpt (the first few pages) of my essay "The Oceanic Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space." This is my most Deleuzian pi...

# data[].attributes.headline
Ursula Le Guin 'The message not only involves, it is, a relationship between speaker and hearer. The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, the speaker, and the hearer are all embedded' 

# data[].attributes.subject
Ursula Le Guin 'The message not only involves, it is, a relationship between speaker and hearer. The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, the speaker, and the hearer are all embedded' 

# data[].attributes.headline
FORUM ON ATTUNEMENTPosthuman Attunements: Aesthetics, Authority and the Artsof Creative ListeningJulian BrigstockeCardiff UniversityTehseen NooraniThe New School for Social Researc

# data[].attributes.subject
FORUM ON ATTUNEMENTPosthuman Attunements: Aesthetics, Authority and the Artsof Creative ListeningJulian BrigstockeCardiff UniversityTehseen NooraniThe New School for Social Researc

# data[].attributes.headline
FATHOMS - “How to remain compassionately engaged with distant, unmet things?” 

# data[].attributes.subject
FATHOMS - “How to remain compassionately engaged with distant, unmet things?” 

# data[].attributes.body
The World in the Whale

By Rebecca Giggs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nonfiction

A humpback whale off the coast of the Dominican Republic stares back. Credit... Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

FATHOMS
The World in the Whale
By Rebecca Giggs

A few years ago, the writer Rebecca Giggs found herself at a public attraction: the beaching of an immature humpback whale. While other Australians dandled babies in pastel rompers or munched fish and chips, Giggs honored the whale with her sustained attention, noting how, "because it was still young, it was pink in the joints under its fins" and how the shore break "concertinaed" its chest, as the rush of water momentarily buoyed its tons. She did not glance away from the hard facts: recognizing that the blubber that had insulated it in the Antarctic now meant that it "was boiling alive in the kettle of itself." And as the vigil came to an end, she didn't shy from staring it in the eye - the "color of midnight, midocean," with "no eyelashes" and "no tear ducts."

This discerning and insistent gaze captures the spirit of "Fathoms: The World in the Whale," Giggs's delving, haunted and poetic debut. Giggs is worth reading for her spotlight observations and lyricism alone, but she also has an important message to deliver. Spurred by her encounter with the doomed humpback, she questions the conventional wisdom that all is well with whales now that conservation campaigns have helped their populations rebound over the last few decades. "Whales demanded a new story," she writes. "A story that overrode the narrative of success I'd long been told, even as it promised to be just as planet-sized."

For many writers, this might become an excuse for a travelogue, but Giggs's physical journey adds up to little more than an unremarkable commercial whale-watching tour, a jaunt to a ceremony celebrating whalers in Japan and a few terrestrial outings near her home in Australia. Instead, her journey is intellectual; she relentlessly follows lines of questioning for marathon distances. The case of a sperm whale that swallowed whole an entire greenhouse becomes an opportunity to range: from the unnaturalness of the "salad bowl" of Europe feeding Britain tomatoes through the winter, to the storms powered by climate change that swept the structure to sea, to the dangers that too-durable household objects pose for marine life, to whales incorporating toxins from such detritus into their bodies so that they literally become pollution.

Image

This is what Giggs means in her subtitle, "The World in the Whale." For she uses whales as invitations to consider everything else: the selfie-ization of environmentalism, the inherent worth of parasites, Jungian psychoanalysis, solar storms, whale songs records going multiplatinum and so much more. In the cascade of mini-essays that results, Giggs comes off as much as a cultural critic as a naturalist.

All this cogitation is both the overall strength and occasional weakness of the book. For in a work about whales, there are few direct encounters with the awe-inducing leviathans; basically, just the single whale-watching tour and two strandings. This can make certain passages feel like a literary distillation of volumes of scientific papers through which actual lobtailing, rainbow-spouting, aria-ululating whales rarely breach. At times, there was so much analyzing of symbolic whales that I felt bereft of actual ones.

But maybe that's the point. Giggs is extremely sensitive to how our "tormented love" of cetaceans can be "a need to connect, so dire, that it smothers the beloved" - as when she devastatingly dissects a photo of a mob in Argentina petting a baby dolphin to death. Instead, she asks: "How to remain compassionately engaged with distant, unmet things?" For whereas it's become almost de rigueur for writers to anthropomorphize the intelligence and soulfulness of whales, when Giggs finally does face a live humpback at sea, she thinks: " Only the most witless individual would believe in a benevolent connection with real whales, with any affinity that runs outside of metaphor." And if this "one-sided intimacy" proves melancholy, well, Giggs concludes that can be positive if it is a "haunting that moves us from indecision, to action" on the whales' behalf.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Staring Into the Eye of a Whale and Seeing the Whole World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nonfiction FATHOMS The World in the Whale By Rebecca Giggs A few years ago, the writer Rebecca Giggs found herself at a public attraction: the beaching of an immature humpback whale.

# data[].attributes.headline
Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, the artistic research program Meandering (2021–23) unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to cultivate the vitality of water, from source to sea. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, the artistic research program Meandering (2021–23) unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to cultivate the vitality of water, from source to sea. 

# data[].attributes.body
By developing critical-creative insight about the interconnectedness between land and coastal waters, freshwater, and the ocean system, the program forms a case-study in regenerative cultural practice in the Guadalquivir Valley, in Andalusia, Spain. The research develops a methodology for “thinking oceanically about more-than-Ocean,” and for supporting an ecological praxis that seeks to generate both inner transformation and the conditions of possibility for social change.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, the artistic research program Meandering (2021-23) unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to cultivate the vitality of water, from source to sea.

By developing critical-creative insight about the interconnectedness between land and coastal waters, freshwater, and the ocean system, the program forms a case-study in regenerative cultural practice in the Guadalquivir Valley, in Andalusia, Spain. The research develops a methodology for "thinking oceanically about more-than-Ocean," and for supporting an ecological praxis that seeks to generate both inner transformation and the conditions of possibility for social change.

Meandering takes an experiential and experimental approach to foster renewed sensibilities for social and environmental justice. It commissions artists to engage local agents, schools, public administration, young persons, neighborhood associations, spiritual communities, designers, policy makers, and activist platforms connected to environmental struggles in the region, to formulate a practical and poetic toolset for understanding our interdependence with the watershed.

The program's course through the Guadalquivir traces river systems through the sierras and forests in the south of Spain, to the heartlands of the Americas and the undersurface of the Mediterranean, in a complex cartography of cultural, ecological, and spiritual exchange. For this journey, pop polymath Lafawndah (b.1984, France); philosophy-trained choreographer Isabel Lewis (b. 1981, Dominican Republic); and visionary artist Eduardo Navarro (b. 1979, Argentina) are invited to develop new participatory and community-oriented research fellowships to be presented alongside site-specific performances, river-walks, poetry, music, meditation, and communal meals. These activities take form through annual convenings, as well as in a digital platform on Ocean-Archive.org, and in a publication forthcoming in 2024. Art direction and documentation by photographer Lourdes Cabrera (b. 1979, Spain) as well as olfactory R&D by artist Chaveli Sifre (b. 1987, Puerto Rico) further the possibilities of situated approaches to commissioning artwork that can be accessed widely and in the benefit of local communities.

Meandering continues TBA21's commitment to building the capacities and resources for expanded notions of Ocean stewardship and climate responsibility. Through attending to place-based knowledge, both new and ancestral, the program contributes to contemporary debates on justice in river governance and literacy on the transformation of freshwater ecosystems, as well as to the growing field of interfaith and interdisciplinary environmental studies, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, the artistic research program Meandering (2021-23) unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to cultivate the vitality of water, from source to sea.

# data[].attributes.headline
Re-stor(y)ing Oceania is a new exhibition comprising two new site-specific commissions by Indigenous artists from the Pacific, Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta. The exhibition is curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini, who returns to Ocean Space after her 2021 solo exhibition. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Re-stor(y)ing Oceania is a new exhibition comprising two new site-specific commissions by Indigenous artists from the Pacific, Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta. The exhibition is curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini, who returns to Ocean Space after her 2021 solo exhibition. 

# data[].attributes.body
Drawing together performance, sculpture, poetry, and movement, Havini’s curatorial vision is guided by an ancestral call-and-response method. Havini uses this as a means to seek solidarity and kinship in times of uncertainty. Real threats to life call for the need to slow down the clock on extraction and counter this with reverence for life of the Oceans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Re-stor(y)ing Oceania is a new exhibition comprising two new site-specific commissions by Indigenous artists from the Pacific, Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta. The exhibition is curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini, who returns to Ocean Space after her 2021 solo exhibition. Drawing together performance, sculpture, poetry, and movement, Havini's curatorial vision is guided by an ancestral call-and-response method. Havini uses this as a means to seek solidarity and kinship in times of uncertainty. Real threats to life call for the need to slow down the clock on extraction and counter this with reverence for life of the Oceans. Opening at Ocean Space, Venice in Spring 2024, the exhibition also coincides with the 60th International Art Biennale.

The Pacific Islands are one of the regions most impacted by the damaging effects of climate change, and their Indigenous leaders and communities have led the call for more study and greater awareness of the ensuing crises for decades. Havini is joined by a curatorium, working closely together to produce public programs centering Indigenous perspectives from across Oceania, Australia, and the Asia-Pacific and its diasporas. These gatherings will provide space for exchanges and conversations, including three days of live performances held over the Venice Biennale vernissage week (April 16-20, 2024), and will remain accessible online, creating a new archive of stories and contributions by First Nations artists, curators, writers, community leaders, poets, musicians, navigators, sailors, fisherfolk and scholars, expanding on the current understandings of our oceans.

For the new commissions, Havini has invited artist Latai Taumoepeau, who uses faivā (performing art) grounded in Tongan philosophies of relational vā (space) and tā (time). Centered in the body, faivā cross-pollinates ancient and everyday temporal practices to make visible the impact of the climate crisis in the Pacific. In the artist's own words, 'The more ancient I am, the more contemporary my work is'. The significance of song to poetically record histories and to share values and knowledge in Taumoepeau's homeland of Tonga is acknowledged through the creation of a new choral work focused on her firm resistance to deep sea mining. The newly commissioned work, Deep Communion sung in minor (archipelaGO, THIS IS NOT A DRILL), will engage audiences in the process of giving Pacific islanders a voice on this issue.

Sculptural and interactive machines installed in Ocean Space will provide audiences with opportunities to engage with Taumoepeau's Deep Communion sung in minor (archipelaGO THIS IS NOT A DRILL) either through activating the installation - which will trigger part of the musical score - or by taking a seat in the surrounding bleachers to witness local sports teams in performance with the work.

In response to Taumoepeau's new solo commission, a live project space emerges at Ocean Space that is imagined in collaboration with Wāhine architect Elisapeta Heta, a Māori, Samoan, and Tokelauan leader and advocate for change, whose work provides Maori and Pasifika perspectives on the importance of place to design and cultural identity.

Heta is affiliated to the Ngāti Wai and Waikato Tainui iwi with Samoan and Tokelauan heritage. In her response to this exhibition, Heta will present a new multi-sensory installation, The Body of Wainuiātea, embodying ritual and ceremony guided by the Māori concept of tikanga from her ancestral lands of Aotearoa New Zealand, alongside those from across the Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa. Tikanga is derived from the Māori word 'tika', which means 'right' or 'correct', so to act in accordance with tikanga is to behave in a way that is culturally proper or appropriate. Designed for exchange and collaboration, this welcoming space seeks to use ancient ways of knowing and relating through story and waiata (song) to restore a greater awareness of atua (the gods) connections to our Ocean, re-establishing the tapu (sacred) within current environmental and scientific campaigns seeking to protect the life of the planets largest bodies of water. Collaborators include Dr Albert Refiti, Hiramarie Moewaka, and Rhonda Tibble.

Across the Pacific, there is a particular way of hosting guests through storytelling. The Body of Wainuiātea by Heta provides a safe and welcoming space for re-establishing a solidarity network of artists, curators, writers, community leaders, poets, musicians, navigators, sailors, fisherfolk, scholars, scientists, lawyers, and communities. A series of conversations, performances, and actions will be programmed in this space over the opening and during 2024, inviting contributions from multi-disciplinary practitioners.
The exhibition is commissioned by TBA21-Academy and Artspace, Sydney, and produced in partnership with culture and innovation hub.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Re-stor(y)ing Oceania is a new exhibition comprising two new site-specific commissions by Indigenous artists from the Pacific, Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta. The exhibition is curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini, who returns to Ocean Space after her 2021 solo exhibition .

# data[].attributes.body
Thinking with the Mediterraneans

A conversation between Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal

points to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, the Mediterraneans as plural – plural as their interconnected cultures, and bodies of sweet and salty water, and possibilities of narrating their current transformations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 2021, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal recorded an intimate conversation about the Mediterranean at their Parisian home: " There are many Mediterraneans: the geographical, the historical, the philosophical... the personal, the one we swim, and we have swum in. It's an experience to swim, it is something you can't explain to somebody who never swam. This feeling of being held up by this water."

The third cycle of TBA21-Academy's curatorial fellowship program The Current, spanning from 2021-23 focused on the Mediterraneans in a program entitled Thus waves come in pairs after a line from Adnan's poem "Sea and Fog". It pointed to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, the Mediterraneans as plural - plural as their interconnected cultures, and bodies of sweet and salty water, and possibilities of narrating their current transformations.

The rapid expansion of droughts, disruption of cycles of water and heat waves (above and below the rising sea level, where temperatures are rising and biodiversity is declining) across all Mediterranean shores is a key indicator of climate change in this area, occurring at a pace 20 percent faster than anywhere else on the planet. Mediterraneanization is an expansive global phenomenon now, whose borders and inhabitants are on the move. It calls for reorienting, and registering "the limits of our own apparatuses of knowledge," as Iain Chambers and Marta Cariello write in their essay "The Mediterranean Question: Thinking with the Diver."

By taking the conversation between Adnan and Fattal as a point of departure and inspiration, this publication intends to collect interdisciplinary reflections around/about the Mediterraneans through art, oceanic thinking, science, and activism, as well as to record fragments of the past two years of research, carried out through conversations, lectures, walks, trips, live performances and podcasts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By taking a conversation between artists Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal as point of departure, this volume collects reflections around the Mediterraneans through art, poetry, oceanic thinking, and activism.

# data[].attributes.headline
How dogs dream ? "dreams are not as representations of the world. Rather, they are events that take place in it" 

# data[].attributes.subject
How dogs dream ? "dreams are not as representations of the world. Rather, they are events that take place in it" 

# data[].attributes.body
An ethnographic focus not just on humans or only on animals but on how humans and animals interact explodes this closed self-referential circuit.

# data[].attributes.body
embarked upon a journey along the coast roads of Mayo, Donegal,  Sligo and Galway, seeking out forgotten sea words, maritime terms and coastal customs.

This book contains 38 sea words in Irish he selected  and drawings, collages and photographs by Antic-Ham.

RED FOX Press, based in Achill, Co. Mayo.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Manchán Magan, author of 'Thirty Two Words for Field' embarked upon a journey along the coast roads of Mayo, Donegal, Sligo and Galway, seeking out forgotten sea words, maritime terms and coastal customs.

This book contains 38 sea words in Irish he selected and drawings, collages and photographs by Antic-Ham.

This is a stunning book, hand made by the wonderful RED FOX Press, based in Achill, Co. Mayo.

It would make a wonderful gift to someone, or indeed to oneself, for those who are interested in the Irish Language and Culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sea,Tamagotchi, Manchán, Magan, Thirty, Two

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Manchán Magan, author of 'Thirty Two Words for Field' embarked upon a journey along the coast roads of Mayo, Donegal, Sligo and Galway, seeking out forgotten sea words, maritime terms and coastal customs. This book contains 38 sea words in Irish he selected and drawings, collages and photographs by Antic-Ham.

# data[].attributes.headline
Red Fox Press - Artist's books production and art screenprintingin Achill Island 

# data[].attributes.subject
Red Fox Press - Artist's books production and art screenprintingin Achill Island 

# data[].attributes.body
Possible route for floating language ?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Redfoxpress - Information about our press - Ireland

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
screenprinting, limited edition press, art editions and mail art made by Redfoxpress in Dugort, Achill, County Mayo, Ireland - owned by Francis Van Maele

# data[].attributes.headline
Move Like the Ocean ~ ocean community gathering at Ocean Space

# data[].attributes.subject
Move Like the Ocean ~ ocean community gathering at Ocean Space

# data[].attributes.body
May 25–26, 2024

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do you want to connect with the ever-growing community of people with a shared love for the Ocean? This May and June, we are organizing moments to get together and celebrate our online coalescence of thinkers, makers, writers, readers, swimmers, speakers, and listeners. You can join us in person, at Ocean Space in Venice, or in the virtual oceans of our digital ecosystem.
Move Like the Ocean ~ ocean community gathering at Ocean Space
May 25-26, 2024
Join us at Ocean Space, Venice, for Move Like the Ocean: a community gathering delving into the looming threats to the deep sea and the collective motions to resist them.
Waves come in sets, moving across the Ocean together before crashing onto the coastline and returning their kinetic energy into the immense body of water. As communities, we also come together in fluid groups, assembling and reassembling to dedicate our energies to different destinations, visions, and dreams. From deep-sea mining to other forms of ocean extractivism, this event will showcase the ideas and projects emerging from TBA21-Academy's digital programming around the deep sea.

PROGRAM:
Saturday, May 25, 2024
5-7 pm | Deep Sea Mining & Community Resistance
A panel discussion with Mekhala Dave, Fiona Middleton, and Pietro Consolandi, moderated by Aleksandra Czerniak; a "Blue Peril" movie screening; and a presentation of short videos from the workshops "Shaping the Invisible" with Lara Garcia Reyne.

The panel discussion will dive into the topic of deep-sea mining, the deep ocean ecosystem, and what it means to culture the deep sea. Through the experience of the last semester of TBA21-Academy's online learning initiative OCEAN / UNI focused on the deep sea, we will explore how we, as a community, can engage with the deep. The discussion will be followed by a screening of the film "Blue Peril" and a presentation of videos from "Shaping the Invisible", the videomaking and montage workshops with filmmaker and editor Lara Garcia Reyne.

7-9pm | Aperitivo & ocean community DJ set by GRLMONSTER69
An ocean comm/uni/ty DJ set will bring together rhythms from all across the seven seas. We will play songs that make us move like the ocean! The tracklist was prepared in collaboration with the ocean comm/uni/ty.

Sunday, May 26, 2024
10-12 am | Arpentage: a collective reading session
On Sunday, May 26, we will run a reading group around "The Hydrocene Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water" by Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris. We will examine the book utilizing the "arpentage" method, developed by French factory workers between the world wars to read complex texts-specifically Marxist theory-in a collaborative way. A group of up to 15 students will be assigned different parts of the book and will have time to read them and take notes before reconvening and collaboratively reconstructing it.

In June 2024, a series of online events will be led by members of the ocean comm/uni/ty, including workshops, film screenings, lightning talks, and meeting circles. Come along to find out what's happening in our digital ecosystem, meet other artists, researchers, students, and ocean lovers, and share your practice, ideas, or work-in-progress. All events are free and open to existing and new members of the ocean comm/uni/ty. To sign up, first join the ocean comm/uni/ty; and sign up for events in the .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do you want to connect with the ever-growing community of people with a shared love for the Ocean? This May and June, we are organizing moments to get together and celebrate our online coalescence of thinkers, makers, writers, readers, swimmers, speakers, and listeners.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Transcript

NARRATOR:

All pinnipeds have four flippers, a layer of blubber, and sensitive whiskers on their snouts. The Harbor seal has all of these and a lot more. Like many marine animals, Harbor seals have streamlined fusiform bodies, tapered at both ends. Harbor seals have spotty coats. The dorsal side has more spots then the ventral side. To move around, the Harbor seal depends on its flippers. The pectoral, or fore, flippers are short and webbed with five bony digits. The digits are about the same length and each has a blunt claw, around one to two inches long. In the water, the fore flippers are used for steering. The webbed hind flippers also have five bony digits. But the outside bones are longer and wider then the inside ones. Moving the hind flippers from side to side propels the Harbor seal through the water.

Harbor seals are very graceful swimmers, but because their hind flippers don't rotate, they're very clumsy on land. Tucked in between the hind flippers is a short tail. Harbor seals are covered in short, thick hair. Each year after breeding season, they shed their hair in patches. Molting lasts one to two months. All that hair doesn't keep them warm, however. For that, they rely on their insulating blubber. Harbor seals are endothermic animals. They control their body temperatures by burning internal fuel, which in turn, keeps them warm.

Harbor seals have a mouth full of teeth, but they don't use any of them for chewing. Their front teeth are sharp and pointed, and great for grasping and tearing. Back molars are used for crushing the shells of crustaceans and mollusks. Being a pinniped, the Harbor seal can open and close its nostrils. When the nose muscles are relaxed, the nostrils are closed and airtight. The lenses in their eyes are adapted for focusing on refracted light in the water. Their pupils are similar to cats' pupils: opening wide in dim light and closing to slits when it's bright. They also have a reflective membrane that makes their eyes glow when hit with light, just like cats eyes. Instead of ear flaps, Harbor seals have an external ear opening to the ear canal. It opens and closes when they dive. They have good hearing above and below the water, but respond to sound better in air. The whiskers are called vibrissae, and each vibrissa moves independently. The vibrissae are very sensitive to movement and can detect the smallest vibrations. These signals help with navigation and in finding food, especially in dark water and at night when vision is limited.

All of these parts working together make the harbor seals one amazing marine mammal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NARRATOR: All pinnipeds have four flippers, a layer of blubber, and sensitive whiskers on their snouts. The Harbor seal has all of these and a lot more. Like many marine animals, Harbor seals have streamlined fusiform bodies, tapered at both ends. Harbor seals have spotty coats.

# data[].attributes.headline
 To write through listening is to move towards our sensory outer reaches, into the simultaneous difficulty and pleasure of finding words to describe what we think and feel that we hear. This is writing on the edge of comprehension, of surrender to this edge, and even beyond it.

# data[].attributes.subject
 To write through listening is to move towards our sensory outer reaches, into the simultaneous difficulty and pleasure of finding words to describe what we think and feel that we hear. This is writing on the edge of comprehension, of surrender to this edge, and even beyond it.

# data[].attributes.body
'I have been thinking too of the potency and persuasion of naming, when as listeners we are directed to what we are hearing by a singular definition of the sound source – a source which is always more than one, always beyond us even if in front of us, but which is granted some notional coherency through naming.'

# data[].attributes.headline
Isabel Lewis - Ten Days Six Nights, Lewis hosted a number of her signature occasions, combining music, food, drink and perfume to create an alternative environment for dance, discussions and invited musicians.

# data[].attributes.subject
Isabel Lewis - Ten Days Six Nights, Lewis hosted a number of her signature occasions, combining music, food, drink and perfume to create an alternative environment for dance, discussions and invited musicians.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Isabel Lewis ­– 'A 21st Century Ritual' | TateShots

# data[].attributes.headline
Isabel Lewis  will host a durational performance as part of the format Occasion during the TBA21–Academy Convening, curated by Sofia Lemos, where Lewis will expand through movement, dance, discourse, and singing as well as culinary and smell offerings, her ongoing research on devotional listening, Sufi mysticism, and flamenco in connection to the environmental histories of the Guadalquivir River and the region of Andalusia.

# data[].attributes.subject
Isabel Lewis  will host a durational performance as part of the format Occasion during the TBA21–Academy Convening, curated by Sofia Lemos, where Lewis will expand through movement, dance, discourse, and singing as well as culinary and smell offerings, her ongoing research on devotional listening, Sufi mysticism, and flamenco in connection to the environmental histories of the Guadalquivir River and the region of Andalusia.

# data[].attributes.body
Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, our artistic research program, Meandering, unfolds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to reveal our interdependence with the watershed. Through sharing experience and experimentation, and by developing critical-creative insight about the interplays between river, land, ocean, and atmosphere, the program anchors TBA21–Academy’s practices and methodologies for “thinking oceanically about more-than-ocean.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Seeking Andalusia-based performers for the performance An Occasion by Isabel Lewis in the context of TBA21-Academy's artistic research program, , curated by Sofía Lemos.

Open to professional adult performers of all ages, especially 40+ years old.

Application deadline: June 1, 2023.

Only applicants currently based in the region of Andalusia, Spain, will be considered.

On November 11, 2023, the artist Isabel Lewis (b. 1981, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) will host a durational performance as part of the format Occasion during the TBA21-Academy Convening, curated by Sofia Lemos, where Lewis will expand through movement, dance, discourse, and singing as well as culinary and smell offerings, her ongoing research on devotional listening, Sufi mysticism, and flamenco in connection to the environmental histories of the Guadalquivir River and the region of Andalusia.

Applicants with an interest and sensibility for ecological practices in the cultural field are especially encouraged to apply.

Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, our artistic research program, Meandering, unfolds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways to reveal our interdependence with the watershed. Through sharing experience and experimentation, and by developing critical-creative insight about the interplays between river, land, ocean, and atmosphere, the program anchors TBA21-Academy's practices and methodologies for "thinking oceanically about more-than-ocean."

Lewis' performance will expand on "O.C.E.A.N.I.C.A. (Occasions Creating Ecologically Attuned Narratives in Collective Action)" (2021), an exhibition-performance and experimental pedagogy project, commissioned by TBA21-Academy at Ocean Space in Venice and curated by Chus Martinez. O.C.E.A.N.I.C.A. aimed at reprogramming the body to recognize the human potential to be oceanic by listening to the language of the Ocean. In Córdoba, Lewis' research focuses on developing protocols to listen to river-speak. You can read more about her work O.C.E.A.N.I.C.A. here and hear the artist sharing about Occasions, a collective format Lewis has developed as a way of sharing her research through movement, song, discourse, dialogue, fashion and furniture design, as well as smell here.

Who and what are we looking for

We are looking for 3 professional performers to participate in a durational group performance with the following rehearsal schedule:

- The briefing and first rehearsals will take place June 21 - 23, 2023
- Rehearsals continue between September 18 -29, 2023 (exact dates tbc)
- Final rehearsals between November 5 -10, 2023
- Dress rehearsal and performance on November 11, 2023

Isabel Lewis is seeking professional dancers above legal age and especially over the age of 40. Lewis is interested in performers with either classical or contemporary backgrounds, with previous performance experience or well-established physical practices who are interested in and familiar with improvisation and instant composition. Particular preference will be given to expanded disciplinary practices, including contemporary dance and flamenco. Performers of Black, Roma-sinti and queer backgrounds are especially encouraged to apply. A strong technical foundation is appreciated but more importantly, we want to work with performers who are willing to explore a non-traditional (though highly structured) composition and who are grounded, calm, and nuanced in their movement, but still have the capacity to be explosive and precise within subtle and small movements. In addition, the performers will need to feel comfortable using their voice in public speaking and singing. This is a paid position.

All applicants must be able to confirm that they are available for the full rehearsal schedule. Only applicants who have submitted all the required application materials will be considered.

To apply send us an email to cordoba@tba21.org and please provide:

- Contact information (address, email, phone number)
- A picture of yourself (JPEG, PDF)
- A CV/resume (PDF)
- The privacy policy signed by the candidate (attached below)
- A four-minute video in two parts (MP4, MOV).

For the video, in the first two minutes, please introduce yourself and answer the following questions:
Which aspects of dance do you carry into your daily life? Do you feel that dance has a role in culture beyond self-expression? If so, how?
The other two minutes should be a recording of yourself dancing to a favorite song as though you were dancing alone somewhere private. Video can be filmed simply on a mobile phone or computer camera. There is no need for extra production, editing, or special effects in the videos.

The application deadline is on June 1, 2023. Final selection will be made and communicated by June 16, 2023. Selected applicants are expected to be present in Córdoba for a briefing session on June 21, 2023.

The application can be submitted in either Spanish or English.

1. Applicants must be over 18 years old.
2. This is a paid collaboration. Honorariums are set 75€ rehearsal day (6 hours) and 40€ / half-day rehearsal (3 hours). A one-hour break is included in the full rehearsal day. In addition, there will be a 300€ flat-rate fee for the performance pending on experience. Accomodation and travel expenses will be also covered within Andalusia. Selected participants will receive a per diem.
3. The working language will be English although rehearsals are bilingual. The artist, Isabel Lewis is English-speaking with a good command of Spanish language.
4. If you are selected, you are expected to take part in all rehearsals and performances.
5. The performance will last continuously between two-three hours, with breaks as needed.
6. TBA21-Academy will cover expenses associated with travel or accommodation in the region of Andalusia pending on the applicants' need.

In case of any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out via cordoba@tba21.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Seeking Andalusia-based performers for the performance An Occasion by Isabel Lewis in the context of TBA21-Academy 's artistic research program, , curated by Sofía Lemos. Open to professional adult performers of all ages, especially 40+ years old. Application deadline: June 1, 2023. Only applicants currently based in the region of Andalusia, Spain, will be considered.

# data[].attributes.headline
To Feel Again: A Symposium on Re-Sensitisation

# data[].attributes.subject
To Feel Again: A Symposium on Re-Sensitisation

# data[].attributes.body
Re-Sensitisation ~ links to my research on touching as sensing ~

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
To Feel Again: A Symposium on Re-Sensitisation - Void Derry | Contemporary Art Derry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We’re excited to announce a two-day symposium as part of Void Art Centre’s current project Composting for the future.

# data[].attributes.headline
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.subject
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.headline
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.subject
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.headline
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.subject
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.headline
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.subject
Keynote lecture and discussion by Pascal Gielen, Overheated Cultures in Undercooled Flatscapes 

# data[].attributes.body
Donna Haraway

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are all lichens.
- Scott Gilbert, "We Are All Lichens Now"

Think we must. We must think.
-Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Biological sciences have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of the Earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo sapiens  - the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species,Modern Man - was a chief product of these knowledge practices. What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on Earth must not be named the Anthropocene!

With all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my littermates who find a rich wallow in multispecies muddles, I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.

My first demon familiar in this task will be a spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, near where I live in North Central California. Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something. This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. This spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes. The eight-legged tentacular arachnid that I appeal to gets her generic name from the language of the Goshute people of Utah and her specific name from denizens of the depths, from the abyssal and elemental entities, called chthonic. The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many. Making a small change in the biologist's taxonomic spelling, from cthulhu to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa chthulu I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is,and might yet be: the Chthulucene. I remember that tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning "feeler," and tentare, meaning "to feel" and "to try"; and I know that my leggy spider has many-armed allies. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene.

The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines - and such a wealth of lines - not at points, not in spheres. "The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers"; generations are like "a series of interlaced trails."

All the tentacular stringy ones have made me unhappy with posthumanism, even as I am nourished by much generative work done under that sign. My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile. Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle! Ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle made a bumper sticker for me, for us, for SF: "Composting is so hot!"

Shaping her thinking about the times called Anthropocene and "multi-faced Gaïa" (Stengers's term) in companionable friction with Latour, Isabelle Stengers does not ask that we recompose ourselves to become able, perhaps, to "face Gaïa." But like Latour and even more like Le Guin, one of her most generative SF writers, Stengers is adamant about changing the story. Focusing on intrusion rather than composition, Stengers calls Gaia a fearful and devastating power that intrudes on our categories of thought, that intrudes on thinking itself. Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet. Gaia's intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects up multitudes. This intrusion threatens not life on Earth itself - microbes will adapt, to put it mildly - but threatens the livability of Earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an "event" already under way called the Sixth Great Extinction.

Stengers, like Bruno Latour, evokes the name of Gaia in the way James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis did, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole. In this hypothesis, Gaia is autopoietic - self-forming, boundary maintaining, contingent, dynamic, and stable under some conditions but not others. Gaia is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but achieves finite systemic coherence in the face of perturbations within parameters that are themselves responsive to dynamic systemic processes. Gaia does not and could not care about human or other biological beings' intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman livable presents and futures. Gaia is not about a list of questions waiting for rational policies; Gaia is an intrusive event that undoes thinking as usual. "She is what specifically questions the tales and refrains of modern history. There is only one real mystery at stake, here: it is the answer we, meaning those who belong to this history, may be able to create as we face the consequences of what we have provoked."

Anthropocene

So, what have we provoked? Writing in the midst of California's historic multiyear drought and the explosive fire season of 2015, I need the photograph of a fire set deliberately in June 2009 by Sustainable Resource Alberta near the Saskatchewan River Crossing on the Icefields Parkway in order to stem the spread of mountain pine beetles, to create a fire barrier to future fires, and to enhance biodiversity. The hope is that this fire acts as an ally for resurgence. The devastating spread of the pine beetle across the North American West is a major chapter of climate change in the Anthropocene. So too are the predicted megadroughts and the extreme and extended fire seasons. Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire in our times are at stake.

Thus it is past time to turn directly to the time-space-global thing called Anthropocene. The term seems to have been coined in the early 1980s by University of Michigan ecologist Eugene Stoermer (d. 2012), an expert in freshwater diatoms. He introduced the term to refer to growing evidence for the transformative effects of human activities on the Earth. The name Anthropocene made a dramatic star appearance in globalizing discourses in 2000 when the Dutch Nobel Prize - winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen joined Stoermer to propose that human activities had been of such a kind and magnitude as to merit the use of a new geological term for a new epoch, superseding the Holocene, which dated from the end of the last ice age, or the end of the Pleistocene, about twelve thousand years ago. Anthropogenic changes signaled by the mid-eighteenth-century steam engine and the planet-changing exploding use of coal were evident in the airs, waters, and rocks. Evidence was mounting that the acidification and warming of the oceans are rapidly decomposing coral reef ecosystems, resulting in huge ghostly white skeletons of bleached and dead or dying coral. That a symbiotic system - coral, with its watery world-making associations of cnidarians and zooanthellae with many other critters too - indicated such a global transformation will come back into our story.

But for now, notice that the Anthropocene obtained purchase in popular and scientific discourse in the context of ubiquitous urgent efforts to find ways of talking about, theorizing, modeling, and managing a Big Thing called Globalization. Climate-change modeling is a powerful positive feedback loop provoking change-of-state in systems of political and ecological discourses. That Paul Crutzen was both a Nobel laureate and an atmospheric chemist mattered. By 2008, many scientists around the world had adopted the not-yet-official but increasingly indispensable term; and myriad research projects, performances, installations, and conferences in the arts, social sciences, and humanities found the term mandatory in their naming and thinking, not least for facing both accelerating extinctions across all biological taxa and also multispecies, including human, immiseration across the expanse of Terra. Fossil-burning human beings seem intent on making as many new fossils as possible as fast as possible. They will be read in the strata of the rocks on the land and under the waters by the geologists of the very near future, if not already. Perhaps, instead of the fiery forest, the icon for the Anthropocene should be Burning Man!

The scale of burning ambitions of fossil-making man - of this Anthropos whose hot projects for accelerating extinctions merits a name for a geological epoch - is hard to comprehend. Leaving aside all the other accelerating extractions of minerals, plant and animal flesh, human homelands, and so on, surely, we want to say, the pace of development of renewable energy technologies and of political and technical carbon pollution-abatement measures, in the face of palpable and costly ecosystem collapses and spreading political disorders, will mitigate, if not eliminate, the burden of planet-warming excess carbon from burning still more fossil fuels. Or, maybe the financial troubles of the global coal and oil industries by 2015 would stop the madness. Not so. Even casual acquaintance with the daily news erodes such hopes, but the trouble is worse than what even a close reader of IPCC documents and the press will find. In "The Third Carbon Age," Michael Klare, a professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, lays out strong evidence against the idea that the old age of coal, replaced by the recent age of oil, will be replaced by the age of renewables. He details the large and growing global national and corporate investments in renewables; clearly, there are big profit and power advantages to be had in this sector. And at the same time, every imaginable, and many unimaginable, technologies and strategic measures are being pursued by all the big global players to extract every last calorie of fossil carbon, at whatever depth and in whatever formations of sand, mud, or rock, and with whatever horrors of travel to distribution and use points, to burn before someone else gets at that calorie and burns it first in the great prick story of the first and the last beautiful words and weapons. In what he calls the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas, hydrofracking is the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Melting of the polar seas, terrible for polar bears and for coastal peoples, is very good for big competitive military, exploration, drilling, and tanker shipping across the northern passages. Who needs an ice-breaker when you can count on melting ice?

A complex systems engineer named Brad Werner addressed a session at the meetings of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in 2012. His point was quite simple: scientifically speaking, global capitalism "has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that 'earth-human systems' are becoming dangerously unstable in response." Therefore, he argued, the only scientific thing to do is revolt! Movements, not just individuals, are critical. What is required is action and thinking that do not fit within the dominant capitalist culture; and, said Werner, this is a matter not of opinion, but of geophysical dynamics. The reporter who covered this session summed up Werner's address: "He is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability." Werner is not the first or the last researcher and maker of matters of concern to argue this point, but his clarity at a scientific meeting is bracing. Revolt! Think we must; we must think. Actually think, not like Eichmann the Thoughtless. Of course, the devil is in the details - how to revolt? How to matter and not just want to matter?

Capitalocene

But at least one thing is crystal clear. No matter how much he might be caught in the generic masculine universal and how much he only looks up, the Anthropos did not do this fracking thing and he should not name this double-death-loving epoch. The Anthropos is not Burning Man after all. But because the word is already well entrenched and seems less controversial to many important players compared to the Capitalocene, I know that we will continue to need the term "Anthropocene." I will use it too, sparingly; what and whom the Anthropocene collects in its refurbished netbag might prove potent for living in the ruins and even for modest terran recuperation.

Still, if we could only have one word for these SF times, surely it must be the Capitalocene.

Species Man did not shape the conditions for the Third Carbon Age or the Nuclear Age. The story of Species Man as the agent of the Anthropocene is an almost laughable rerun of the great phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure, where man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end in tragic detumescence, once again. Autopoietic, self-making man came down once again, this time in tragic system failure, turning biodiverse ecosystems into flipped-out deserts of slimy mats and stinging jellyfish. Neither did technological determinism produce the Third Carbon Age. Coal and the steam engine did not determine the story, and besides the dates are all wrong, not because one has to go back to the last ice age, but because one has to at least include the great market and commodity reworldings of the long sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the current era, even if we think (wrongly) that we can remain Euro-centered in thinking about "globalizing" transformations shaping the Capitalocene. One must surely tell of the networks of sugar, precious metals, plantations, indigenous genocides, and slavery, with their labor innovations and relocations and recompositions of critters and things sweeping up both human and nonhuman workers of all kinds. The infectious industrial revolution of England mattered hugely, but it is only one player in planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations. The relocation of peoples, plants, and animals; the leveling of vast forests; and the violent mining of metals preceded the steam engine; but that is not a warrant for wringing one's hands about the perfidy of the Anthropos, or of Species Man, or of Man the Hunter.

The systemic stories of the linked metabolisms, articulations, or coproductions (pick your metaphor) of economies and ecologies, of histories and human and nonhuman critters, must be relentlessly opportunistic and contingent. They must also be relentlessly relational, sympoietic, and consequential. They are terran, not cosmic or blissed or cursed into outer space. The Capitalocene is terran; it does not have to be the last biodiverse geological epoch that includes our species too. There are so many good stories yet to tell, so many netbags yet to string, and not just by human beings.

As a provocation, let me summarize my objections to the Anthropocene as a tool, story, or epoch to think with:

(1) The myth system associated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story, but not the whole story.

(2) Species Man does not make history.

(3) Man plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human exceptionalists tell.

(4) That History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do not do History.

(5) The human social apparatus of the Anthropocene tends to be top-heavy and bureaucracy prone. Revolt needs other forms of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and effectiveness.

(6) Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an "unthinkable" theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian individualism - preexisting units in competition relations that take up all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide).

(7) The sciences of the Anthropocene are too much contained within restrictive systems theories and within evolutionary theories called the Modern Synthesis, which for all their extraordinary importance have proven unable to think well about sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogenesis, development, webbed ecologies, and microbes. That's a lot of trouble for adequate evolutionary theory.

(8) Anthropocene is a term most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples.

I am aligned with feminist environmentalist Eileen Crist when she writes against the managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted, modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments of so much Anthropocene discourse. This discourse is not simply wrong-headed and wrong-hearted in itself; it also saps our capacity for imagining and caring for other worlds, both those that exist precariously now (including those called wilderness, for all the contaminated history of that term in racist settler colonialism) and those we need to bring into being in alliance with other critters, for still possible recuperating pasts, presents, and futures. "Scarcity's deepening persistence, and the suffering it is auguring for all life, is an artifact of human exceptionalism at every level." Instead, a humanity with more earthly integrity "invites the priority of our pulling back and scaling down, of welcoming limitationsof our numbers, economies, and habitats for the sake of a higher, more inclusive freedom and quality of life."

If Humans live in History and the Earthbound take up their task within the Anthropocene, too many Posthumans (and posthumanists, another gathering altogether) seem to have emigrated to the Anthropocene for my taste. Perhaps my human and nonhuman people are the dreadful Chthonic ones who snake within the tissues of Terrapolis.

Note that insofar as the Capitalocene is told in the idiom of fundamentalist Marxism, with all its trappings of Modernity, Progress, and History, that term is subject to the same or fiercer criticisms. The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the brink of becoming much Too Big. Marx did better than that, as did Darwin. We can inherit their bravery and capacity to tell big-enough stories without determinism, teleology, and plan.

Historically situated relational worldings make a mockery both of the binary division of nature and society and of our enslavement to Progress and its evil twin, Modernization. The Capitalocene was relationally made, and not by a secular godlike anthropos, a law of history, the machine itself, or a demon called Modernity. The Capitalocene must be relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic SF patterns and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin could be proud of. Shocked anew by our - billions of Earth habitants', including your and my - ongoing daily assent in practice to this thing called capitalism, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers note that denunciation has been singularly ineffective, or capitalism would have long ago vanished from the Earth. A dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alternatives, as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive, and reconnect with each other, in multispecies well-being. This explication does not excuse us from doing many important things better; quite the opposite. Pignarre and Stengers affirm on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying well. They remind us that the established disorder is not necessary; another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of Progress. Many Marxist critical and cultural theorists, at their best, would agree. So would the tentacular ones.

Chthulucene

Reaching back to generative complex systems approaches by Lovelock and Margulis, Gaia figures the Anthropocene for many contemporary Western thinkers. But an unfurling Gaia is better situated in the Chthulucene, an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names. Arising from Chaos, Gaia was and is a powerful intrusive force, in no one's pocket, no one's hope for salvation, capable of provoking the late twentieth century's best autopoietic complex systems thinking that led to recognizing the devastation caused by anthropogenic processes of the last few centuries, a necessary counter to the Euclidean figures and stories of Man. Brazilian anthropologists and philosophers Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski exorcise lingering notions that Gaia is confined to the ancient Greeks and subsequent Eurocultures in their refiguring the urgencies of our times in the post-Eurocentric conference "The Thousand Names of Gaia." Names, not faces, not morphs of the same, something else, a thousand somethings else, still telling of linked ongoing generative and destructive worlding and reworlding in this age of the Earth. We need another figure, a thousand names of something else, to erupt out of the Anthropocene into another, big-enough story. Bitten in a California redwood forest by spidery Pimoa chthulhu, I want to propose snaky Medusa and the many unfinished worldings of her antecedents, affiliates, and descendants. Perhaps Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, can bring us into the holobiomes of Terrapolis and heighten our chances for dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the Heroes on a living coral reef instead of allowing them to suck the last drop of fossil flesh out of dead rock.

The terra-cotta figure of Potnia Theron, the Mistress of the Animals, depicts a winged goddess wearing a split skirt and touching a bird with each hand. She is a vivid reminder of the breadth, width, and temporal reach into pasts and futures of chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond. Potnia Theron is rooted in Minoan and then Mycenean cultures and infuses Greek stories of the Gorgons (especially the only mortal Gorgon, Medusa) and of Artemis. A kind of far-traveling Ur-Medusa, the Lady of the Beasts is a potent link between Crete and India. The winged figure is also called Potnia Melissa, Mistress of the Bees, draped with all their buzzing-stinging-honeyed gifts. Note the acoustic, tactile, and gustatory senses elicited by the Mistress and her sympoietic, more-than-human flesh. The snakes and bees are more like stinging tentacular feelers than like binocular eyes, although these critters see too, in compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics.

In many incarnations around the world, the winged bee goddesses are very old, and they are much needed now. Potnia Theron/Melissa's snaky locks and Gorgon face tangle her with a diverse kinship of chthonic earthly forces that travel richly in space and time. The Greek word Gorgon translates as dreadful, but perhaps that is an astralized, patriarchal hearing of much more aweful stories and enactments of generation, destruction, and tenacious, ongoing terran finitude. Potnia Theron/Melissa/Medusa give faciality a profound makeover, and that is a blow to modern humanist (including technohumanist) figurations of the forward-looking, sky-gazing Anthropos. Recall that the Greek chthonios means "of, in, or under the Earth and the seas" - a rich terran muddle for SF, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, and speculative fabulation. The chthonic ones are precisely not sky gods, not a foundation for the Olympiad, not friends to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, and definitely not finished. The Earthbound can take heart - as well as action.

The Gorgons are powerful winged chthonic entities without a proper genealogy; their reach is lateral and tentacular; they have no settled lineage and no reliable kind (genre, gender), although they are figured and storied as female. In old versions, the Gorgons twine with the Erinyes (Furies), chthonic underworld powers who avenge crimes against the natural order. In the winged domains, the bird-bodied Harpies carry out these vital functions. Now, look again at the birds of Potnia Theron and ask what they do. Are the Harpies their cousins? Around 700 BCE Hesiod imagined the Gorgons as sea demons and gave them sea deities for parents. I read Hesiod's Theogony as laboring to stabilize a very bumptious queer family. The Gorgons erupt more than emerge; they are intrusive in a sense akin to what Stengers understands by Gaia.

The Gorgons turned men who looked into their living, venomous, snake-encrusted faces into stone. I wonder what might have happened if those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones. I wonder if such manners can still be learned, if there is time to learn now, or if the stratigraphy of the rocks will only register the ends and end of a stony Anthropos.

Because the deities of the Olympiad identified her as a particularly dangerous enemy to the sky gods' succession and authority, mortal Medusa is especially interesting for my efforts to propose the Chthulucene as one of the big-enough stories in the netbag for staying with the trouble of our ongoing epoch. I resignify and twist the stories, but no more than the Greeks themselves constantly did. The hero Perseus was dispatched to kill Medusa; and with the help of Athena, head-born favorite daughter of Zeus, he cut off the Gorgon's head and gave it to his accomplice, this virgin goddess of wisdom and war. Putting Medusa's severed head face-forward on her shield, the Aegis, Athena, as usual, played traitor to the Earthbound; we expect no better from motherless mind children. But great good came of this murder-for-hire, for from Medusa's dead body came the winged horse Pegasus. Feminists have a special friendship with horses. Who says these stories do not still move us materially? And from the blood dripping from Medusa's severed head came the rocky corals of the western seas, remembered today in the taxonomic names of the Gorgonians, the coral-like sea fans and sea whips, composed in symbioses of tentacular animal cnidarians and photosynthetic algal-like beings called zooanthellae.

With the corals, we turn definitively away from heady facial representations, no matter how snaky. Even Potnia Theron, Potnia Melissa, and Medusa cannot alone spin out the needed tentacularities. In the tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling, the spider of my first pages, Pimoa chthulhu, allies with the decidedly nonvertebrate critters of the seas. Corals align with octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish. Octopuses are called spiders of the seas, not only for their tentacularity, but also for their predatory habits. The tentacular chthonic ones have to eat; they are at table, cum panis, companion species of terra. They are good figures for the luring, beckoning, gorgeous, finite, dangerous precarities of the Chthulucene. This Chthulucene is neither sacred nor secular; this earthly worlding is thoroughly terran, muddled, and mortal - and at stake now.

Mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral reefs, octopuses are called spiders of the sea. And so Pimoa chthulhu and Octopus cyanea meet in the webbed tales of the Chthulucene.

All of these stories are a lure to proposing the Chthulucene as a needed third story, a third netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing, for staying with the trouble. The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman. As a suffix, the word kainos, "-cene," signals new, recently made, fresh epochs of the thick present. To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen - yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the Earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this Earth are the main story.

However, the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others. It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness. Like it or not, we are in the string figure game of caring for and with precarious worldings made terribly more precarious by fossil-burning man making new fossils as rapidly as possible in orgies of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story. The chief actors are not restricted to the too-big players in the too-big stories of Capitalism and the Anthropos, both of which invite odd apocalyptic panics and even odder disengaged denunciations rather than attentive practices of thought, love, rage, and care.

Both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the "game over, too late" discourse I hear all around me these days, in both expert and popular discourses, in which both technotheocratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any possible common imagination. Encountering the sheer not-us, more-than-human worlding of the coral reefs, with their requirements for ongoing living and dying of their myriad critters, is also to encounter the knowledge that at least 250 million human beings today depend directly on the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes for their own ongoing living and dying well. Diverse corals and diverse people and peoples are at stake to and with each other. Flourishing will be cultivated as a multispecies response-ability without the arrogance of the sky gods and their minions, or else biodiverse terra will flip out into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult.

Corals helped bring the Earthbound into consciousness of the Anthropocene in the first place. From the start, uses of the term Anthropocene emphasized human-induced warming and acidification of the oceans from fossil-fuel-generated CO2 emissions. Warming and acidification are known stressors that sicken and bleach coral reefs, killing the photosynthesizing zooanthellae and so ultimately their cnidarian symbionts and all of the other critters belonging to myriad taxa whose worlding depends on intact reef systems. Corals of the seas and lichens of the land also bring us into consciousness of the Capitalocene, in which deep-sea mining and drilling in oceans and fracking and pipeline construction across delicate lichen-covered northern landscapes are fundamental to accelerating nationalist, transnationalist, and corporate unworlding.

But coral and lichen symbionts also bring us richly into the storied tissues of the thickly present Chthulucene, where it remains possible - just barely - to play a much better SF game, in nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle. We are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the Earth. Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations between and among rocks and critters for living and dying well. " 'Do you realize,' the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, 'that [once upon a time] they couldn't even read Eggplant?' And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike's Peak.' " Attending to these ongoing matters returns me to the question that began this text. What happens when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Why is it that the epochal name of the Anthropos imposed itself at just the time when understandings and knowledge practices about and within symbiogenesis and sympoietics are wildly and wonderfully available and generative in all the humusities, including noncolonizing arts, sciences, and politics? What if the doleful doings of the Anthropocene and the unworldings of the Capitalocene are the last gasps of the sky gods, not guarantors of the finished future, game over? It matters which thoughts think thoughts.

We must think!

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

This text is an edited extract from chapter 2, "Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene," in Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. Copyright, 2016, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu

Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently, Manifestly Haraway.

© 2016 e-flux and the author

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene - Journal #75

# data[].attributes.headline
Winter approaches “tentacular thinking” both figuratively and literally. Tentacles, used for sensing, grasping, and feeding, hang from the gallery’s ceiling as reminders of the messy entanglements between humans and the Earth’s other inhabitants. Proposing radical new alliances through our tentacular links, Haraway offers the power of storytelling as a “practice of caring and thinking.”

# data[].attributes.subject
Winter approaches “tentacular thinking” both figuratively and literally. Tentacles, used for sensing, grasping, and feeding, hang from the gallery’s ceiling as reminders of the messy entanglements between humans and the Earth’s other inhabitants. Proposing radical new alliances through our tentacular links, Haraway offers the power of storytelling as a “practice of caring and thinking.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For her first solo exhibition in Budapest entitled Tentacular Thinking, Vienna-based artist and director Stephanie Winter transforms Liget Gallery into a multi-layered ritual space. Borrowing the exhibition's title from the second chapter in feminist scholar Donna Haraway's pivotal book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Winter approaches "tentacular thinking" both figuratively and literally. Tentacles, used for sensing, grasping, and feeding, hang from the gallery's ceiling as reminders of the messy entanglements between humans and the Earth's other inhabitants. Proposing radical new alliances through our tentacular links, Haraway offers the power of storytelling as a "practice of caring and thinking."

Winter uses feminist speculative fabulation as her primary artistic method. Her immersive installation can be interpreted as a cave-referencing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"-or as a female womb. She creates an environment where we can learn to tell our stories anew and reevaluate our histories as a species in the face of planetary ecocide. As Haraway puts it, Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO.

Winter's photographs and video works are driven by a multi-perspective narrative in which the artist slips into different fictional and real characters. Her self-portrait, The Neanderthal (2022), shows the artist as a Neanderthal woman contemplating a silver bone, referencing Ursula K. Le Guin's 1986 essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," and proposing a change of perspective, in which the bag, rather than the weapon, takes precedence instead of our linear, progressive, Techno-Heroic modes of establishing human history. It's an invitation to begin thinking about our existence with a vessel, container, an instrument, that serves the gathering of sustenance and stories, symbolizing the principles of community and exchange.

Through the creation of this immersive, welcoming ritual space, Winter aims to find new ways of community-building, gathering, and sharing food, knowledge and stories. The exhibition will be accompanied by a rich program of workshops and the launch of her publication The Earth is a Glowing Pudding, which includes glossary entries, excerpts from conversations with experts related to Winter's artistic research, and visual documentation of her performances, installations and films.

Curated by Veronika Molnár.

Special thanks to the gallery team: Hanna Claris and Lili Kátai.

The exhibition is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest.

Photos by Richard Tóth and Anna Palkó.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For her first solo exhibition in Budapest entitled Tentacular Thinking, Vienna-based artist and director Stephanie Winter transforms Liget Gallery into a multi-layered ritual space. Borrowing the exhibition's title from the second chapter in feminist scholar Donna Haraway's pivotal book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Winter approaches "tentacular thinking" both figuratively and literally.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tentacular Thinking - Weeknotes 4 — Careful Industries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What kind of imagery might help us think about possible ways to visualise our Observatory?

# data[].attributes.body
Alone while surrounded, confined in open air, two castaway figures explore a sea of contradictions in Slow Tide. Stepping away from the controlled world of the theatre, Luke Murphy invites audiences to step into the open as two performers brave the world around them on oceans, seas, rivers and lakes. A meditation on emerging, falling and floating, creating an otherworldly physical poem around themes of time, place, isolation and perseverance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Alone while surrounded, confined in open air, two castaway figures explore a sea of contradictions in Slow Tide. Stepping away from the controlled world of the theatre, Luke Murphy invites audiences to step into the open as two performers brave the world around them on oceans, seas, rivers and lakes. A meditation on emerging, falling and floating, creating an otherworldly physical poem around themes of time, place, isolation and perseverance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alone while surrounded, confined in open air, two castaway figures explore a sea of contradictions in Slow Tide. Stepping away from the controlled world of the theatre, Luke Murphy invites audiences to step into the open as two performers brave the world around them on oceans, seas, rivers and lakes.