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Glossary note related to the Nature/Environment–Ecosystem/Native cluster (by Leone Contini) 

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Glossary note related to the Nature/Environment–Ecosystem/Native cluster (by Leone Contini) 

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Cluster description: the ecosystem–environment pair, borders on nature on one side and on native on the other (native is understood as a point of arrival). After some hesitation, I decided to keep the term nature (whose genealogy cannot be addressed here) for its ability to specify a semantic connotation (as we shall see) – “nature” will nevertheless remain opaque in this gloss. The central reflection will mainly concern the description of how the binomial “ecosystem/environment” can be associated with “native,” downstream—using a fluvial metaphor: following its descending course toward “native,” that is, excluding many other possibilities.

Preliminary note on the meaning of ecosystem and environment.
“Environment,” from the dictionary:
“1) The surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates (+ the setting or conditions in which a particular activity is carried on — not considered in this gloss + Computing the overall structure within which a user, computer, or program operates — not considered in this gloss.)
2) The natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity.”

Observation:
Meaning 2) is close to the generic meaning of “nature,” thus confirming its usefulness as a semantic specifier.

“Ecosystem,” from the dictionary:
“A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment”

Ecosystem seems to imply environment, while environment implies—at least in its first sense—the idea of living, operating biological subjects: “in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.”
Interesting is the singular declension: while the two terms (ecosystem and environment) appear intersecting, ecosystem in fact seems to define a more detailed level of meaning, with respect to “community” and “interaction.”

Starting from this somewhat generic background of meaning drawn from the dictionary, the aim of this glossary note is to investigate the downstream consequences of the environment–ecosystem pair, that is, the possibility that it may associate with “native”—merge into it.

What I think (my hypothesis?) is that different implications/meanings of the pair(+nature) have very different downstream consequences.
But how do we imagine the pair(+nature), which from now on I will call “aggregate”? How is it thought to have formed? How did the relations discussed within it come into being? How can it connect to “native”?
First of all, the definition of Environment that interests us here is twofold, and thus there will be two aggregates. The analysis must therefore be broken down:

i) (Potentially) dynamic aggregate. Ecosystem on its own, or in combination with the first meaning of environment (“in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates”), could also imagine a structurally dynamic “world,” always in becoming, potentially adaptable and capable of creating new equilibria in short time spans. This dynamic scheme may refer to a single ecosystem–environment, but also to relations between different ecosystem–environments: it could include, as constitutive, the movement of living beings (human and non-human migrations, for example) from one place to another.

ii) Native aggregate. The relational nature of ecosystem changes radically when it is associated with the second sense of environment: “physical environment” (ecosystem) tends to merge with “natural world” (environment) + with the disruptive role played by human activity (let us recall that in the first sense of environment nothing is mentioned other than the “surroundings or conditions in which animal, vegetal, or human subjects live or act”). The relational dimension of ecosystem is thus “affected” (let us add: disturbed?) by human action. In this new aggregate there emerges, I believe, the idea of a system of relations that have been reciprocally structured over the prolonged and “non-human” time of natural evolution, in relation to specific places: each co-evolutionary dynamic appears anchored to a specific geography, having been “born” there (in Italian born (nato) and native share the same root), having grown there, belonging to it intrinsically from the outset. It is the extremely rapid temporality of human activity that introduces a disturbance, causing the collapse of geographical barriers, that is, the native environments within which native relational systems (native ecosystems) were formed. Upstream of this interpretation, I believe, there is a more or less implicit assumption that our species at some point exited the natural order, thus moving from an animal state to a fully human one. It is the infrastructures created by humans, tending toward a global scale (a “vocation” that manifests from the earliest human migrations?), that have disturbed the many (native) universes formed over hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of co-evolution.

Thus, two aggregates are defined; of these, only ii) contains an oppositional human/nature dynamic, in which human action interrupts the co-evolutionary harmony of specific ecosystem–environments.
Only this aggregate can integrate “native” within itself, finally defining the nature/environment/ecosystem/native cluster that this gloss set out to investigate.

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This excerpt is taken from Bojana Piškur's text titled "Politicisation of Friendship" (2014).

"When friendship is based on desire, it doesn’t fall under the imperative of

collaboration, nor does it constitute some kind of temporary or seeming community or strive towards a specific goal. Rather, it is about “truly dissensual politics”, in which encounters between singularities create the conditions for the production of thought. But not just any kind of thought: what we have in mind is the production of thought of a special order, when two or more people are “capable of taking upon themselves the diference and making it generative”. Moreover, encounters of this sort constitute venturing into unknown territories, taking risks that could lead to something new, understood as an experience of intensity, as a rupture with the commonplace.

Friendship therefore can’t simply be equated with collective spirit and collective work. The way friendship is conceived and understood here, it can only mean some kind of rigorous existence, extreme in terms of singularity, gestures of revolt and their inherent potential. Friendship is thus a form of emancipation, not in the sense of

political correctness, consensus or search for some universal truth, but as a constant

discovering of what we are and what we become in the processes of friendship."

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screenshot of Donna Haraway's text, Situated Knowledges, 1988. p. 15

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Embodiment - an incomplete defintion of the term / Riff

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Embodiment - an incomplete defintion of the term / Riff

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Embodiment

The term "Embodiment" stands in opposition to the idea that the Cartesian duality of body and mind is outdated and that knowledge is gained and experienced through the totality of the lived body.

Embodiment in the context of artistic research often refers to the knowledge and experience gained through the body in creative processes such as performance or sculpting. By doing so, embodiment can be both a method and a part of the theoretical framework.

An often-cited reference is Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledges (1988), which frames embodied experience in contrast to supposedly neutral knowledge of the natural sciences, positioning the subject as accountable. Feminist thinkers like Haraway highlight the importance of the author's body and its conditions (societal, cultural, physical, geographical, sexual orientation, etc.) as significant factors in knowledge production (-> positionality).

Example:

"Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. Embodiment is a significant prosthesis; objectivity cannot be about fixed vision when what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about. "

Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges 1988, p.15

——————-

Embodiment is also at the core of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" (first published in 1945), where the French philosopher emphasises the body as a totality for experiencing the world.

Bodily experiences shape that perception beyond the duality of mind and body, he argues against the theories of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant of the Enlightenment era.

Echoes of this thinking, that body and mind are separated, can be found in contemporary language, for example: "My body is aching," which suggests that the "body" is separated from the "I" of the speaking person.

The ideas Merleau-Ponty presents about embodiment are not only rooted in a purely philosophical discussion but also draw on psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and aesthetics.

Merleau-Ponty's idea of embodiment had a significant influence not only on contemporary philosophy but also on areas of psychology.

- Nina N.

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I propose to add:

- Relational, Relationality

- Poetics

and possibly Relational Poetics, the term/framework I am building.

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I propose the term ‘collective’; its meaning shifts according to cultural, political and theoretical lenses and is also defined by positionality

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I propose the term sensescape building on the concept of emplacement (Howes, 2005): the sensory interrelationship of body, mind, and environment.

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I propose one of these connected terms: Exile/unhomeliness to explore the condition of being and feeling out of place.

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Hi, I propose the following tangle of terms: nature, ecosystem/environment, native (maybe nature is too much)

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I propose the term “re-enactment”. Although it is commonly associated with performative art practices, it can also be understood as an umbrella term for a set of artistic and curatorial practices of exhibition making that have become prominent over the last couple of decades and are often designated through “re+verb”, such as “re-construction” or “re-staging”. I refer specifically to projects that re-exhibit, with varying degrees of fidelity, previous historical installations or exhibitions – Vladislav Shapovalov

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I propose to consider adding a term "the artist as ...". Referring to the book The Artist as Producer: Quarry, Thread, …, this term opens up a discussion about the roles and positions artists take in the world.

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INSTANCE: Slides used in a course introductory session.

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INSTANCE: Slides used in a course introductory session.

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INSTANCE: Preliminary outline of a research project.

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INSTANCE: Preliminary outline of a research project.

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A working paper that attempts to lay out in advance the research agenda for the mapping project.

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INSTANCE: Mapping the Political Imaginary (research project)

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INSTANCE: Mapping the Political Imaginary (research project)

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This is a research project and seminar that is seeking to map this term and its operational value and use within different research traditions including social theory, political theory, literature, anthropology, art practice and artistic research.

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CAPIm – Mapping of the Political Imaginary (2025-2027)

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We add the term "political imaginary" (18/06/2025) because it has become a key term in the research environment of HDK-Valand over the last decade, culminating in 2024 in the establishment of the new Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm) a joint initiative with KKH, Stockholm.

The development of this term as a key focus at HDK-Valand can be tracked through a series of research-based courses. See:

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/626844/on-friendship-and-the-political-imaginary-course/

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/577999/on-friendship-and-the-political-imaginary-course/

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/520373/three-courses-on-art-and-the-political-imaginary/

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/447725/art-and-politics-summer-courses/

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/376433/two-contemporary-art-and-politics-summer-courses/

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/310551/introduction-to-contemporary-arts-and-politics/

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/165668/para-platforms-on-the-spatial-politics-of-right-wing-populism/

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Archiving Spaciocide: Video — Topographies

Pelin Tan and Özge Çelikaslan https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/archiving-spaciocide-video-topographies/

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Archiving Spaciocide: Video - Topographies - URGENT PEDAGOGIES

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Urgent Pedagogies is a project and space for inquiry, sharing knowledge and experience, and consists of public events and an emerging online platform and archive, highlighting and discussing practice and theory.

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This sub-section exists as a way to profile terms which are specifically employed in the research pedagogy of HDK-Valand's Artistic Practice PhD Programme. These terms include:

covering statement

research frugality

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We add this term cluster here because of the centrality of "documented artistic research project in the Swedish national qualifications framework specification of the doctoral award on artistic grounds. This raises the question of what constitutes a "document" and the act of "documenting".

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We have added this cluster as opposed to just the term "practice" alone, as a way to address the way practice circulates as a highly weighted term within debates of doctoral researchers in the arts, often i simply dichotomies such as practice & theory, writing and practice; practice-led and practice-based as descriptors of genres of research; and "my" practice as a prerogative of reserachers.

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These terms and term-clusters were proposed by participants in the Spring 2025 Methods PhD Course:

art

design

camouflage

community

creativity

holism / holistic

indigenous / indigeneity

knowledge

landscape / territory

more than human / non human / transhuman

nature

task (as in “research task”)

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RIFF: Macherey's Philosophy as Operation (Essay)

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RIFF: Macherey's Philosophy as Operation (Essay)

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INSTANCE: An ecology of practices, Isabelle Stengers (Paper)

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INSTANCE: An ecology of practices, Isabelle Stengers (Paper)

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Introductory notes on and ecology of practices by Isabelle Stengers

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"What could terms such as ‘altergorithm’, 'rewilding’, ‘negentropy’ and ‘technoanimalism’ possibly have in common? The answer lies in the pages of this book: they are all neologisms that attempt to come to terms with the complex ities of the posthuman predicament. Every time we refer to some of these neologisms in the introduction, we will insert the inverted commas, as a way of indexing them and alerting the readers to the specific inception of the terms."

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some fragmentary notes on neoliberalism (developed for the course on pubic art)

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RIFF: Some fragmentary notes on Neoliberalism

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RIFF: Some fragmentary notes on Neoliberalism

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some fragmentary notes neoliberalism and public art

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I am proposing that the term "task" be added to the glossary because it has been used repeatedly during the semester and it is also something that is not clear, and so I believe up for debate.

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Atlas of Transformation is a book with almost 900 pages. It is a sort of global guidebook of transformation processes. With structured entries, its goal is to create a tool for the intellectual grasping of the processes of social and political change in countries that call themselves "countries of transformation" or are described by this term. The Atlas of Transformation was first published in Czech and it contains more than 200 "entries" and key terms of transformation

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INSTANCE: Ethics of arts-based and artistic research in care contexts (Paper)

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INSTANCE: Ethics of arts-based and artistic research in care contexts (Paper)

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"Background: Arts-based practice and research in care has increased significantly. There is a need to examine the ethical issues arising from this complex phenomenon, conceptualized as boundary work.

Method: To support interdisciplinary understanding in artistic and arts-based work, we collaboratively explored three arts-based research projects implemented in diverse care and healthcare contexts. The ethical issues related to boundary work were negotiated through reciprocal, in-depth reflection.

Results: Arts-based and artistic research allows embodied, sensitive, and sensible encounters to emerge, in which the boundaries between artistic agency, professional positions, and even notions of evidence may be challenged. The notion of vulnerability emerges as a central ethical feature of boundary work.

Conclusions: Articulating ethical concerns in artistic-pedagogic boundary work and research can promote a more nuanced understanding of power relations in cross-sectoral practices. It may help develop services that support the agency and holistic well-being of individuals and communities."

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Negotiating boundaries: reflections on the ethics of arts-based and artistic research in care contexts

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Arts-based practice and research in care has increased significantly. There is a need to examine the ethical issues arising from this complex phenomenon, conceptualised as boundary work.To support…

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INSTANCE: Unmarked Graves: The Bones of Neoliberalism (essay)

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INSTANCE: Unmarked Graves: The Bones of Neoliberalism (essay)

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"This text looks at both refugees and unmarked graves as particular symptoms of an emerging fragile future. Through personal and geopolitical lenses, it asks how and why neoliberal globalization seems to be merging with new forms of fascism. It is an excerpt from the wider project Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, which is a forthcoming film and book. "

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Unmarked Graves: The Bones of Neoliberalism – Umbau

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As an architecture, the unmarked grave is a type of space that produces refugees, where to stay is to put oneself at risk of being murdered and disappeared. . .

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"In a context marked by the virulent return of patriarchal and white supremacist attitudes, a new generation of feminist activists are continuing the struggle: these are very feminist times. But how do these and other movements relate to the contemporary posthuman condition? In this important new book, Rosi Braidotti examines the implications of the posthuman turn for feminist theory and practice. She defines the posthuman turn as a convergence between posthumanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other, and she examines their complex relationship and joint impact. Braidotti claims that mainstream posthuman scholarship has neglected feminist theory, while in fact feminism is one of the precursors of the posthuman turn, through diverse social movements and political traditions. Posthuman Feminism is an analytic and creative response to contemporary conditions and a call to action. It highlights the constraints but also the potentialities available to feminist political subjects as they confront the ever-growing injustices of sexism, racism, ecocide and neoliberal capitalism. This bold new text by a leading feminist philosopher will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences."

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INSTANCE: Ecology of Practices (Chapter)

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INSTANCE: Ecology of Practices (Chapter)

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"Taking the example of the contested ownership of Kennewick Man (a prehistoric skeleton found in Washington state) as a focus of discussion, the chapter addresses the challenges of developing exchanges between cultures as a counter to the noncivilization of science. It considers the ecologically disastrous quality of modern demands that we “judge” and proposes a cultivation of attention and rebelliousness in response to this. A distinction between “sleepwalkers” and “idiots” is used to aid in distinguishing the ecology of practices from the ultimately normative consensual reasoning, and the chapter returns to the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, also explored in Isabelle Stengers's Cosmopolitics, and the resources that he can provide for thinking diplomatically when civil war (between practices) threatens."

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Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.

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INSTANCE: The cinematic representation of trauma (Papers)

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INSTANCE: The cinematic representation of trauma (Papers)

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"The experience of trauma is not just reflected by, but constituted in culture: in the specific medium considered here, in cinema. To represent a trauma cinematically is a means to reflect it, yes; but it is also a means of staging an essentially aesthetic encounter. Such an encounter constitutes both an epistemological and ethical act. In bearing witness to trauma’s representation – ‘misfortune’s image’ in Simone Weil’s felicitous phrase of our title (1986, 213; also Sontag 1987, 49 – 51) – we are driven towards the limit of what it is possible to ‘know’, what it is possible to ‘represent’, and what it is necessary to ‘do’ with unspeakable pain (cf. Rancière 2007, 109 –138). The representation of trauma has been one of the cinema’s central motifs almost since its inception, whether these representations have concerned the traumas of war (Ivan’s Childhood [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962]), genocide (Sophie’s Choice [Alan J. Pakula, 1982]), sexual violence (The Accused [Jonathan Kaplan, 1988]), torture (Death and the Maiden [Roman Polanski, 1994]), homophobia (The Hours [Stephen Daldry, 2002]), or many, many others. The list of films that could be cited is almost as long as the manifestations of trauma itself. But with specific regard to the experience of trauma and its cinematic representation we would like in this article to pose the following questions: to what extent do such cinematic representations ‘fairly portray’ what Simone Weil called ‘misfortune’s image’ (1986, 213): the experience of trauma itself? Or, on the contrary, to what extent do they – through stereotypical cultural representations – reproduce the very forms of structural power which may, in the first place, be trauma’s generative cause? And, finally, to what extent – to deploy a late Foucauldian term – is it possible to problematize, through the medium of cinema itself, these stereotypical representations?"

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INSTANCE: Work Across Ecologies and Disciplines (book) 

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INSTANCE: Work Across Ecologies and Disciplines (book) 

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"Over the past decade, ecological habitats have been increasingly understood as more complex and elusive to study from the lens of a single author or discipline. As new ways of thinking-by-doing collectively become imperative, collaborative practices both inside and outside of academia have emerged in dynamic and vibrant ways. Artists, anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, ecologists, engineers, herbalists, geographers and local communities have begun assembling and employing diverse methods and theories for researching the field site, advocating for a more expansive exchange between new sets of agents.

Collaborations Afield explores the fertile ground of research on the fringe, where collective work takes root across disciplinary boundaries, between human and non-human, biological, microbial, and artificial actors. Work afield signifies both the observational practices of place-based knowledge production and the state of environmental humanities as an area of study itself. To go afield is to venture beyond the range of one’s own expertise by physically working in, and thinking with, the field site. By investigating research questions through close observation, attuned listening, and data gathering, collaborations afield commune around a shared context approached through diverse methodologies."

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Collaborations Afield: Work across Ecologies and Disciplines

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Collaborations Afield: Work across Ecologies and Disciplines

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Collaborations Afield: Work across Ecologies and Disciplines

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"Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are.

The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse."

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Dark Ecology | Columbia University Press

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Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one s... | CUP

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"In this chapter, we explore the politics of interdependencies through situated entanglements with water. Framing more-than-human interdependencies within feminist political ecology means starting from an understanding of relationality. Drawing on research with waters and communities in Maharashtra, India and the Tagus River in Spain, we focus on the co-constitution of embodied subjectivities with the more-than-human, addressing issues of well-being, illness and ecological change in contemporary waterscapes. In doing so we explore the contradictions, tensions and ethical implications of situated more-than-human co-becomings."

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Introduction

In a small drought-prone rural village in Maharashtra, Pravah,1 India, farmers irrigate their farms using the wastewater of the city of Pune. Water becomes multiple and troubled as it is used, embodied, and experienced in different ways. Water(s) and women farmers co-become through their varied relationships to one another. Similarly, the journey of the Tagus River through Spain and Portugal tells a story of multiple, troubling waters interwoven with landscapes, people, histories and more-than-human co-becomings. The Tagus as an entity is shaped by multiple human interests-irrigation, human consumption, international relations-but also shapes human communities within and beyond its basin. These stories raise contradictions and ethical concerns that highlight the importance of thinking through more-than-human interdependencies to understand how water- and hydro-scapes emerge.

Whether a village served by a wastewater scheme in Maharashtra, India, or an inter-basin water transfer infrastructure in Spain, hydraulic schemes and infrastructures create webs of relations within and across multiple scales. This inspires us to grapple with more-than-human concerns. The term "more-than-human" situates humans within the sticky webs of relations, making humans interdependent with other beings and materials (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2003; Isaacs & Otruba 2019). We focus on the relationality of the more-than-human to consider the ethical contradictions that flow of power within these webs engender. These relations can be life-giving or denying (Bawaka Country et al., 2013; Singh, 2013; Zwarteveen & Boelens, 2014), create socionatural difference and inequalities (Ahmed & Zwarteveen, 2012; Harris, 2006; Nightingale, 2006; Sultana, 2009), and permeate the co-constitution of embodied subjectivities (Nightingale, 2006, 2011; Singh, 2013). Particularly, we focus on water and the ways it co-constitutes uneven relations between and within different human beings, other beings and materials across multiple times and scales (Neimanis, 2012). In doing so, we recognise that our attempt to grapple with the more-than-human is always situated, partial and shaped by our positionalities.

In this chapter, Irene Leonardelli presents the section dedicated to Pravah in the second person, recognising herself as a researcher generating data together with a translator as well as with local researchers-activists and informants in the village. Nick Bourguignon presents the section dedicated to the Tagus River in the first person, recounting his experiences and knowledge of the river. Enid Still engages with these narratives philosophically by thinking through the ethical implications of more-than-human interdependencies. Ingrid Nelson and Andrea Nightingale have been co-thinkers through the entire process, helping to find a narrative thread, navigate the wide literatures on socionatures and reflect on feminist political ecology (FPE) praxis. Together, we aim to think of waters through different lenses and in different geographies, with specific histories and socialities, while remaining aware that our human histories and privileges shape these representations of waters. This movement between different positions of the self in relation to water and the more-than-human is intentional, as we feel it reflects the way water is unbound, percolates through bodies and soils, shapes both alliances and conflicts between different actors, such as the state, community organisations and farmers.

Framing more-than-human interdependencies within FPE means starting from an understanding of relationality rather than the experience of distinct individuals (Nightingale, 2011; Rowe, 2005). Exploring this relationality as entangled, multiple and situated has enabled feminist political ecologists to contribute to debates on how subjectivities are co-constituted with the more-than-human (Nightingale, 2006). Andrea Nightingale ( 2013) demonstrates that Scottish fishermen's emotional and political subjectivities are co-constituted by the sea; it can give or take life, it can create a sense of purpose and bend political will, and it can create or destroy possibilities for fishermen. Secondly, intersectional inquiry into how power operates within these entanglements has enabled nuanced accounts of how gender, caste, class, age, seniority, marital positions and ethnicity are differently implicated in the community management of ecological resources (Elmhirst et al., 2017; Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2019). Furthermore, FPE questions how socionaturally constituted power dynamics refract upon hierarchical social relations and boundaries, as well as wider systems of power such as colonialism (Nelson, 2017; Nightingale, 2011).

For this chapter, we draw on this work in FPE and related disciplines, focusing on the development of the concept of more-than-human interdependence in an attempt to trouble essentialising narratives that may be read into such complex and situated relationships (Barad, 2007; Bawaka Country et al., 2013; Haraway, 2003; Nelson, 2017; Nightingale, 2013; Rose, 2012). In doing so, we remain aware that writing about the more-than-human is a socially mediated process, despite the multiple forms of more-than-human agency that go beyond the immediate human experience.

The next section begins with the case of Pravah, where a wastewater reuse scheme allows farmers to farm throughout the year, cultivating different crops both for household consumption and to sell at the market. However, the wastewater that is used for irrigation percolates into the village's shallow aquifer contaminating the existing, scarce, water. Women, who primarily bear responsibility for water, have to navigate different levels of contamination at water sources and adjust their practices accordingly. The concept of "waterscape" flags an ontological definition of water where power is enrolled in co-constitutive representations and materialities of water (Baviskar, 2007). Next, we journey with Nick's account, where the river's ebbs and flows constitute fuel and food that sustains the lives of many beings, as well as embodied memories of co-becoming with the multiple existences of "the Tagus". Bubbling forth in Eastern Spain, the Tagus cuts through canyons and pine forests, meanders past Toledo and across plains and dehesas, joining the Atlantic Ocean in Lisbon. Yet the waters also join with the Mediterranean through the Tagus-Segura Interbasin Water Transfer. Wastewater from Madrid's 6.6 million inhabitants joins the Tagus with wafts of ammonia, to bubble through Toledo. The concept of "hydrosocial territory" helps explore the multiple scales of contested socionatural materializations of spatially bound networks of the river (Boelens et al., 2016). Finally, we discuss the situated knowledges and ethical implications that emerge from these ethnographic explorations and the way they illuminate interdependencies in particular ways that can inform processes of co-becoming with water. Each of the following sections discuss how such interdependencies are lived and yet often obscured, and how thinking with the politics of interdependency can enable us to narrate the situated complexities of their emergence as a process of co-becoming.

Gender-Water Intra-Action in a Wastewaterscape in Maharashtra, India

The main public well in the village is called Sakarbai [sugar lady] because its water used to be pure, fresh and sweet. (...) Water was very scarce outside the monsoon season, but it was so good that it used to taste like coconut water. She [Sakarbai] used to give us the best water even in summer, when we used to climb down the well to get whatever water we could find. But after we started using wastewater for irrigation, she [Sakarbai] was really badly affected. It's not her fault, but her water became disgusting, so we stopped drinking it.

Interview with Sonali, 28 February 2020

Sonali, a seventy-year-old woman belonging to the Maratha caste -the upper caste in the village of Pravah- and who worked her entire life as a farmer, is talking while sitting on the floor of her house. Sakarbai is the name of the well where she used to fetch water for drinking and other domestic purposes since she moved to Pravah as a just-married child, at the age of six. Around 2009, Sakarbai started changing. It happened as more farmers in Pravah started buying wastewater to irrigate, taking advantage of a wastewater reuse system called the Purandar Lift Irrigation Scheme. This was designed by the Government of Maharashtra in the early 2000s to address water scarcity in 60 rural villages located in the Purandar sub-district, southeast of Pune. Wastewater is pumped up from the Mula-Mutha river, which flows through Pune collecting untreated water from the urban sewer system and industrial effluents, manufacturing industries, construction sites, automotive garages and hospitals (Jagtap & Manivanan, 2019). Farmers can buy wastewater outside the monsoon season, usually from January until June when their wells are empty. Along with traditional rainfed crops such as bajra (pearl millet) and jowar (sorghum), they use wastewater to irrigate different non-traditional crops, particularly flowers, to sell at markets in nearby towns and in Pune. Wastewater reaches Pravah through a system of pump houses and pipelines; farmers store it in private water ponds (Leonardelli et al., 2022). From these ponds, wastewater percolates into the shallow aquifer of the village, contaminating the existing, albeit scarce, groundwater. This way, all wells (those used for irrigation as well as Pravah's former drinking water well Sakarbai) get recharged with (at least partly) contaminated water.

As the Purandar Lift Irrigation Scheme changes water flows, a wastewaterscape (Karpouzoglou & Zimmer, 2016) emerges. This entails new material-discursive relations between different humans and waters. Wastewater opens up possibilities (e.g., for irrigating and thus farming differently) and closes down others (e.g., drinking pure and sweet groundwater), re-articulating more-than-human relations in troubling ways that raise ethical questions and concerns. Here we unfold some of these re-articulations focusing on the interdependencies between women farmers2 and water, thereby troubling boundaries that signify what is considered an ethical encounter. We make this choice because in Pravah, like throughout Maharashtra and other parts of rural India, fetching water, cooking, cleaning, washing and bathing children are tasks performed mostly by women. Women also perform much of the everyday work in the farm, work which is profoundly mediated by water (Krishna & Kulkarni, 2019). The focus on women farmers also stems from our ethico-political commitment to complicate dominant representations, challenging the processes through which women farmers' experiences, knowledges and practices are marginalised and/or silenced, especially those of women farmers of Scheduled Castes,3 landless women, single women and widows (Bhat, 2016). Indeed, the conceptualization of "farmers" in India most often reproduces the imaginary of farmers as male landowners (Agarwal, 2003; Padhi, 2012; Still, 2022).

Feminist scholars studying water in rural, agrarian contexts have shown how gender and water are intimately interwoven (Ahmed & Zwarteveen, 2012; Bossenbroek & Zwarteveen, 2018; Harris, 2006; Mehta, 2014; Sultana, 2009). Their interdependence is simultaneously material, symbolic and discursive, with "gender" and "water" (and all that emerges in their relation for instance farming) continuously co-constituting and re-defining one another (Bossenbroek & Zwarteveen, 2018). Re-allocations of water, for instance, those fostered by neoliberal processes of development, imply changes in gender labour relations, roles and responsibilities, thus also re-defining gendered embodied subjectivities (Harris, 2006). At the same time, experiences such as headaches and backaches from hauling heavy loads of water, as well as the health implications arising from consuming unsafe water, illustrate how embodied gendered subjectivities are spatially produced through everyday dealings with water (Sultana, 2009).

These studies have pointed out how everyday dealings with water significantly shape gendered embodied subjectivities. Yet what we aim to emphasise here is that how water behaves in and through specific landscapes (seeping, percolating, overflowing, evaporating) and what it transports (algae, sediments, organic matters, contaminants) also play a role in co-constituting specific gendered embodied subjectivities.

In order to reflect these fluid sensibilities, we draw inspiration from post-human and Science and Technology Studies (STS) feminist scholars, as they cultivate sensitivity for what more-than-humans, and water particularly, trigger and afford in socionatural relations (Barad, 2007; Neimanis, 2017; Pickering, 2009). Particularly, Barad ( 2007)'s concept of intra-action helps focus the analysis on how human bodies and more-than-human bodies co-constitute one another simultaneously, discursively and materially, meaning they do not exist as separate, discrete entities. This conceptualization helps us decentre the idea that humans dominate matter to instead pay more attention to the specific behaviours that different humans and more-than-humans, including water, afford as they relate. This becomes useful when unpacking how gendered subjectivities embodied by women farmers of different castes and classes and water co-become in the wastewaterscape of Pravah.

The Multiple Waters of Pravah

Around 2011, soon after the wastewater reuse scheme started functioning, Sonali and all other women farmers across caste and class noticed that the colour of Sakarbai water had become more and more turbid; its taste was more bitter, and unpleasant. At the same time, people fell sick with stomach diseases, which they related to the water they were drinking. These sensorial and embodied experiences laid a foundation for women farmers across castes to re-signify what water is: how and for which purposes it could be used. Though they appreciated the abundance of water in Sakarbai, as they no longer had to depend on government-sponsored water trucks or walk long distances to fetch water during the driest months of the year, they deemed Sakarbai water as unclean, smelly, "full of chemicals" and "dangerous". " It's not her fault " said Sonali: recognising how this exogenous water flow damaged the local "sweet" and "pure" water of their aquifer. For a few years, the Gram Panchayat [village council], in consultation with the local doctor, added a "medicine" to Sakarbai water to disinfect it, to heal it, before using it for drinking and cooking.

Then around 2016, the Gram Panchayat decided to instal a water vending machine (commonly known as a water ATM) behind the main square of the village. This technology purifies Sakarbai's water through a reverse osmosis system to make it safe to drink. Most women farmers now buy this filtered water for drinking; those who can afford it also use it for cooking- mostly women farmers from the Maratha (upper) caste. Other women (mostly those belonging to Scheduled Castes) and the least well-off farmers of the Maratha caste still go to Sakarabi to fetch water for cooking. Only women farmers belonging to a less well-off caste (a Non-Scheduled herding caste) and residing about 2 km away from the main village do not buy filtered water for drinking but disinfect the one they find in their irrigation well. For them, filtered water is too expensive and too long a walk.

For washing clothes, cleaning and bathing, women of all castes use the water they get from the taps installed outside of almost every house of the main village. Tap water is pumped from two public wells located close to several wastewater ponds, transported through a closed pipeline to a water tank, where it is disinfected, and then distributed to the taps. Women farmers told us that this water remains highly contaminated: they would never use it for drinking or cooking, not even after disinfecting it or boiling it themselves. Sometimes it smells badly, especially during the driest months when they buy the greatest quantities of wastewater. Moreover, women farmers of all castes often complain about irritations and rashes on their arms and legs, as well as about hair loss as they use tap water for bathing. Women farmers of the herding caste residing far away from the main village do not have access to tap water as the pipelines connected to the water tank do not reach as far. Since their shelters are located next to the wells they use for irrigating, they pump water directly and use it for domestic uses. They say that well water is pure enough as it percolates from the irrigation ponds where wastewater is initially stored, and in the process is purified by the soil.

In fact, in the narratives of women farmers across castes, the materiality of wastewater changes as it percolates through the soil of Pravah, mixing with groundwater: the longer it percolates, the more it purifies and becomes somehow less exogenous, and therefore also less "bad" and "dangerous" (see Leonardelli & Tozzi, forthcoming). The wastewater stored in the irrigation ponds is deemed the most contaminated. Women farmers know this as they use it across the farm: it smells badly, it contains algae and looks foamy and turbid, especially when it is just delivered. They told us that animals (cows and goats) often get sick if they drink directly from those ponds.

As women farmers navigate and make sense of water quality through the landscape of Pravah, water becomes multiple waters. At different sources, they get water for different purposes; they store them separately and treat them differently. Significantly, while everyone in the village at least partly adjusts their water practices, more well-off farmers (mostly belonging to the upper Maratha caste) have better means to deal with the consequences of this contamination: for instance, buying filtered water for multiple purposes and not just for drinking, accessing medicines and health services if necessary (see also Mehta & Karpouzoglou, 2015).

At the same time, because wastewater percolates in the shallow aquifer, it brings new irrigation and farming opportunities to all farmers of Pravah, not only to those who can afford to buy wastewater for irrigation. Well-off farmers belonging to upper castes can easily access the benefits of the Purandar Lift Irrigation Scheme; they can afford the cost of wastewater as well as the agricultural inputs required to engage in irrigated farming, cultivating diverse crops throughout the year (Leonardelli et al., 2022). Yet less well-off farmers (who are usually of Scheduled Castes and the herding caste) also find more water in their wells: some of them are able to farm on larger plots of land, including commercial crops like flowers. This way, as wastewater percolates through the landscape of Pravah, it benefits farmers across castes, even those that do not have the means to access the irrigation scheme directly.

These new farming opportunities mean both new responsibilities and work burdens for women across castes (Leonardelli et al., 2022). While they play an increasingly important role in deciding what to cultivate and how to organise the work, commercial cash crops such as flowers require a lot of care and effort. Women farmers across castes are increasingly involved in irrigation and in spreading pesticides- tasks that have historically been part of the male domain. Yet, wastewater fosters the growth of unwanted weeds, and thus long hours of strenuous weeding work. Women farmers need to carefully supervise the irrigation process to clear the drips when they are plugged by sediments and algae and wash them with an acid lotion after every cropping cycle (see also Leonardelli & Tozzi, forthcoming). This sheds light on how what wastewater transports and what it is made of also matters in re-articulating everyday work in the farm, and thus also in shaping embodied subjectivities.

Through their intra-action, (waste)water and women farmers co-become in Pravah, in ways that sometimes reinforce and sometimes go beyond caste differences (Nightingale, 2011; see also Leonardelli et al., 2022). In this regard, the relations that enact the wastewaterscape of Pravah are troubling and ambiguous: as wastewater flows from the city to rural areas, it carries particles that co-constitute human and more-than-human bodies. It allows farmers across castes to cultivate and sell more crops throughout the year, but it also pollutes the aquifer, badly affecting the health and well-being of more-than-human bodies, including people's bodies, water, soil, animals (Leonardelli & Tozzi, forthcoming). While farmers, including women farmers across castes, are generally satisfied with being able to sell crops throughout the year and to diversify their livelihood, they -and we, with them- remain entangled in the different "goods" and "bads" at play from using untreated wastewater for irrigation (Abrahamsson et al., 2015). The ethical slipperiness of these more-than-human entanglements enables reflection on the nature of ethics when conceptualised within processes of more-than-human co-becoming- a conceptualisation we grapple with in the final section.

Water Across Time, Space, Basins and Subjects-The Tagus River

Recognising individual human attachment to place, territory or country infuses the political into debates within and across more-than-human entities that pulse through multi-scalar spaces (Bawaka Country et al., 2013). It is also a way of thinking through the troubles of one's positionality in relation to spaces that are always co-constituted by the intra-action between oneself, other humans and more-than-humans (Barad, 2007). Storytelling of the more-than-human (Multispecies Editing Collective, 2017; Tsing, 2015) has the potential to narrate complex stories about the entanglements of life (Fenske & Norkunas, 2017). I therefore tell my own story of interdependence with a river that has been present in my life and is the subject of my own research-the Tagus River.

Visiting stretches of the river reveals different realities that a dominant discourse may hide. Where a political ecology of water (Baviskar, 2007; Boelens et al., 2016; Swyngedouw; 1999) helps think of large and complex hydrosocial territories, feminist contributions (Harris 2006; Neimanis, 2012; Sultana, 2011) emphasise the situatedness, subjectivities and relations of human bodies vis-a-vis more-than-humans, often articulated through the concept of waterscapes. By articulating this story from my situated feminist perspective, I see the Tagus River as a hydrosocial territory and explore ethical dilemmas within it. Hydrosocial territoriality helps me think of the divergent discourses that (re)produce material relations and subjects within a (dominant) political order, which incorporates multiple territorialities across scales, different actors-particularly irrigation communities4-and where dominant modes reconfigure material relations and subjects through particular water truths and knowledge claims (Harris 2006; Boelens et al., 2016). The frictions that emerge when non-dominant territories are pulled into a political order are captured in how inhabitants of the Tagus basin-myself included-narrate, live and experience the river.

The Divergent Flow(s) of the Tagus

The Tagus emerges in a pine grove at 1,600 metres above sea level in Eastern Spain. It leaps westward, gaining speed, until it flows through deep canyons lined with willows and poplars and eagles fly above. This early stretch has human visitors camping and hiking alongside the clear green water, as my family has done, connecting to the riverine landscape produced over geological time. Historically, loggers navigated pine logs along the canyon walls down to the city of Toledo, where they became embedded in buildings and cities.

The river encounters its first human obstacles in the reservoirs of Entrepeñas, Buendía and Bolarque. Since 1979, some Tagus waters flow artificially southeast, across the plains of Castille la Mancha through 286 kilometres of canals and pipes, into the Mundo River and then into the Segura River, watering the historical and expanding irrigation fields of the Spanish Levant (Morote et al., 2020).

Exiting its original canyons, the river meanders down the plains of Guadalajara, with less flow and energy due to the syphoning off to Spain's levant. It reaches Aranjuez, where irrigation communities have cultivated strawberries for centuries (Moreno, 1980), and a few kilometres further downstream the Jarama River joins it. The Jarama is artificially swollen, receiving water transfers from other tributaries to slake the thirst of Madrid's 6 million inhabitants and industries, bringing with it waste. Urban residents of Madrid are physically embodied in the waste that flows down the Jarama into the Tagus, even if awareness of this finishes at the flush of a toilet. As a child, I played in and fell ill from this water that had strong tangs of ammonia.

The polluted river reaches the Castrejón reservoir, before it is channelled along the Castrejón canal. While the canal waters fields, the river itself pulses agonisingly along, reaching the mediaeval bridge of Montalbán. Standing on this bridge, the stillness in the air is pierced by shrieks from a nearby slaughterhouse, and the polluted river turns from brown to red. Amid the stench, storks retrieve unidentifiable things from the water. Witnessing this stretch, through what is seen and smelt, the river is embodied within myself. I react, rejecting these senses. They inform an ambivalent subjectivity, where I directly experience and feel attachment to the river while simultaneously feeling disconnected to its rural stretches by virtue of my identification as both urban and foreign. This then informs a personal politics that is inspired by how the river is in other stretches-clear, flowing, rich. Following Barad's ( 2007) intra-action, this subjectivity is an example of material and discursive co-constitution with the river, and also a reflection of the entanglement of senses, location and material informing this politics (Neimanis 2012, 2013; Singh 2013).

The river regains its waters from the canal and flows onto Talavera de la Reina. Irrigation communities here sprung up after the Spanish Civil War using water from the Alberche River. Yet even this tributary of the Tagus suffers from low flow due to a transfer of its headwaters to Madrid. The river ran dry here in 2006.

The Tagus river runs its course from the region of Castille la Mancha and into Extremadura, where hydroelectric power reigns supreme. The river becomes a series of reservoirs, inundating villages while ancient Roman temples sit atop the view. It receives most of its flow from tributaries. Irrigation associations were created during the Francoist dictatorship, despite low yields since the soil is poor. This was described as a policy of internal colonisation. Even here, the river has its more-than-human witnesses in areas where it flows unimpeded, with hundreds of vultures flying above it in Monfragüe. Yet, the human persists. The river is held in reservoirs throughout this region to ensure that treaty-bound 2,700 hm ³ per year of water are given over the border into Portugal (Escudero Gómez & Martín Trigo, 2020).

But what of the Tagus' waters that flow in the other direction, towards the Levant and the Mediterranean? After the transfer, it mixes with that of the Jucar and Segura Rivers and is spread out along irrigation channels from the Murcia region to the provinces of Alicante and Almeria. When reaching intensely irrigated fields, it is further mixed with groundwater, desalinated water, and treated wastewater, flooded across fields or dripped through plastic pipes, becoming the subject of conflicts over water and farmland (Greenpeace, 2017), and discourse over regional rights to the Tagus. Some of it seeps across the region and into the Mar Menor saltwater lagoon, increasingly afflicted by processes of eutrophication, before entering the Mediterranean. Some also reach the last stretch of the Segura River where it supplies centenary irrigation institutions, which trace their origins to medieval Muslim Spain. For them, their canals hold live and dead water5 depending on its location within the irrigation network. Irrigation farmers on both ends of the transfer embody divergent narratives over how the waters of the Tagus are best used-whether for intensive and modern forms of irrigated agriculture, or to see its waters as live or dead depending on the canal it flows within. The Tagus then becomes entangled with the European polity as it becomes embodied in the fruits and vegetables that are exported throughout Europe.

Conflicting Meanings and Contradictions of Interdependent Waters

The Tagus exemplifies the meeting of multiple discourses, social and material relationships and embodied subjectivities across many hydrosocial territories formed by water transfers. The river and its tributaries are a living, historical and contemporary relationship between humans and more-than-humans, the living and the deceased, the material and the discursive. As Puig de la Bellacasa ( 2017) argues, material practices and ethical dispositions are inseparable, but at the same time they are non-innocent. Multiple conflicting meanings of water, as resource or ecosystem, and the aesthetics and emotions ascribed to it, ranging from pride to sadness to anger, envelop and co-constitute what is a deceivingly simple word, river. The politics of interdependency with water, illuminated in these often-contradictory meanings and relations with the river, enables us to reconsider the more-than-human as active beings in what is considered ethical practice, rather than as simply subjects of ethics (Plumwood, 2012).

By highlighting my own relationship and partial understanding of the river, I recognise my own affects and emotions in my personal history, giving due respect to other subjects inhabiting and living with the same river. This requires looking at how capturing emotional communication between human and more-than-humans takes place (González-Hidalgo & Zografos, 2019), and similarly, understanding the politics of subjects' own understanding of how they care for the same shared river and believe that their actions are "life affirming" (Singh 2013, p. 190).

In this respect, the Tagus can be conceived as a tortured example of a conflict between different understandings of Singh's life affirmative actions that spills out and creates multiple waters-urban wastewater, ecosystem water, potential energy water-within a river, and in turn spills onto other more-than-humans-soils, cities, energy systems-that cross multiple scales. Activists denounce the water transfer to Spain's levant as ecologically crippling, while irrigation farmers in the levant as well as in the Tagus basin are upset by being cast as abusers of the river, while they provide food to millions. Water connects the human scale to all other scales of life (Neimanis, 2012). Recounting the complexity of the Tagus's multi-scalar nodes helps record what polluting activities and those in positions of power have done to territories, humans and more-than-humans as well as the unequal impacts of these actions. Recording and narrating illuminates these stories and histories into contemporary politics, thereby giving possibilities for different directions of political action in the constant co-becoming with the river.

With my partial understanding of the Tagus, I draw out the struggles for dominance and memories of different versions of the Tagus. My telling casts a new light on how activists, irrigation farmers, politicians and civil servants fight over articulating different meanings of life-giving and taking on the river, who is the true steward of water and therefore of land and territory, and who is safe-guarding (human and more-than-human) life (Singh, 2013). This problematizes the hydrosocial territory perspective (Boelens et al., 2016); from a partial and situated understanding, I trace part of the webs of relations among identified subjects-myself, my family, farmers, activists-as co-constituting material flows. Yet the webs of relations are never fully knowable.

Similarly, the fight among actors articulating different meanings is also an exclusionary fight over subjective human values that often affords little compromise. Recognising other value systems allows me to judge what and how other human and more-than-human subjects are valued, and requires me to choose with who/what and how I want to belong (Rowe, 2005). It also forces me to identify the consequences of other value systems, their material and discursive articulations, which lead to outcomes that go against my own ethics of more-than-human life. Belonging is invariably nested in divergent and conflicting understandings of territories, the subjects within, and the forces that subjectify. A more-than-human co-becoming sees me/us as interdependent, even if this interdependence is anything but innocent, and the river carries the consequences of this relational web (Neimanis, 2012) as nitrites and ammonia.

I as researcher co-become (Bawaka Country et al., 2013) with the Tagus as I write the interdependent histories and relationships of the multiple human subjects constantly relating with the Tagus as more-than-human. That this co-becoming is fraught also shows how "Country" is not innocent; rather, it can support and harm life, reflecting flows of power that are multifaceted and consequential for subjects and ecologies (Nightingale, 2011; Swyngedouw, 1999). My own experience and memory inform my situated politics. Interdependency and co-becoming with the Tagus is relational; it is a political and ethical positioning of the self vis-à-vis the more-than-human river, and against socionatural articulations that subject it and us to exclusionary and oppressive ways of living. The smell of ammonia is a testament to, and result of, the uneven politics that co-constitutes the Tagus, and a call for rethinking the ethical implications of interdependent embodied subjectivities of/with the Tagus.

Ethics of More-Than-Human Interdependencies

These situated narratives of co-becoming with water illustrate the politics of interdependencies and their ethical implications. The ebbs and flows of the Tagus River are implicated in the lives and deaths, the thriving and suffering of people and more-than-humans, all of whom shape the fluid waterscapes of the river both materially and discursively. In Pravah, Sakarbai's water has turned "bad" and the tap water has health implications for human and more-than-human beings who use it. Despite this, there are benefits from the use of wastewater. Flowing with the increased, more reliable water supply are economic and social benefits for many in the farming communities. The multiplicity of different waters in both cases are therefore infused with ethics through their situated more-than-human interdependency. Rather than being considered moral or immoral, these relationships with multiple waters are understood and experienced as part of wider webs of ethical significance in everyday life (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). The co-mingling of pasts, presents and potential futures in such waterscapes is therefore also knotted with ethical relations that inform ways of living with the multiplicity of water as it moves, laden with power, through lands, bodies and infrastructures (Rose, 2012). These illustrations of more-than-human interdependencies demonstrate that rather than occurring in an "encounter", interdependencies are always ethical because they emerge through relational assemblages; entangled lives carry responsibility to others, giving both life and death.

When ethics are understood in this way, as enmeshed in multi-species everyday practices, embodied engagement within the world, and more-than-human relational knowledge formation (Richardson-Ngwenya & Nightingale, 2018), this legitimises and makes necessary an acknowledgement of more-than-human interdependencies as crucial to the maintenance of life (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Drawing on the work of Levinas and his student Hatley, feminist philosopher Deborah Bird Rose ( 2012) exemplifies the workings of more-than-human ethical relations by extending the idea of ecological relationality beyond spatially configured power dynamics and locating ethics in time, a move which helps deepen the ethical and justice dimensions of the two water narratives here. Mobilising the work of ecologists on "flying foxes and their co-evolved myrtaceous mutualists", Rose ( 2012, p.135) argues that the webs of mutualism that occur between the myrtaceous trees and flowers which attract flying foxes, who in turn assist in the pollination of various woodland and rainforest species, can be understood as ethical in that they maintain each other, themselves and their future "selves" or generations (see also Zwarteveen & Boelens, 2014 and their conceptualisation of 'socio-ecological justice'). Ethics becomes the ontological condition of the ebb and flow of life and death; it is a responsibility, or maintenance of life, between different beings.

These insights bring us to questions of care and responsibilities once we have narrated co-becomings such as those above. What Rose ( 2012, p.136) terms "multispecies knots of ethical time" are the intertwined histories, presents and futures that are embodied in the practices of species as they move through the world. This ethical intertwining of bodies and ecologies over time and space relates to the feminist stance on the ethics of care as "a vital interweaving web of life" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 4). Following Tronto ( 2015), Puig de la Bellacasa ( 2017, p. 6), maintains a distinction between ethical dispositions and material practices while calling for them to be considered inseparable. In doing so she articulates more-than-human interdependency as an ethics of care:

[...]'ethics' in an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of normative moral obligations but rather about thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed. That is, it makes ethics a hands-on, ongoing process of recreation of 'as well as possible' relations and therefore one that requires speculative opening about what a possible involves [...] unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness.

Thinking of ethics as embodied and situated, helps to decentre the human, and therefore moral discourse, in more-than-human interdependencies. As a speculative politics, this ethics of care is "non-innocent", meaning it is both troubled by its situatedness and co-constituted through complex more-than-human intra-action (Barad, 2007). In Pravah this manifests in the way the wastewaterscape and its social, economic and embodied consequences cause harm as well as material benefits, a contradiction that plays out as women farmers navigate the different scales of the wastewaterscape in everyday life. These ambiguities are further exemplified in the paper by Bawaka Country and colleagues ( 2013), where they reconceptualise natural resource management through the Aboriginal indigenous ontology of co-becoming. Wetj, a practice of reciprocal sharing, care and "intra-action" (Barad, 2007) between all beings, "...springs from and supports a Yolŋu ontology of co-becoming which sees all beings, including human beings, as coming into existence through relationships" (Bawaka Country et al., 2013, p. 187). Or in other words, beings "only exist, be-come vibrant, powerful and important, through relationships" (ibid., 2013, p. 189). They demonstrate how the perspective and meaning of natural resource management changes when agency and communicative status is given to Country. Rather than assuming humans as the primary care-givers and care-takers of Country, the maintainers of morality, Country is seen as a sentient, multifaceted assemblage of beings that sometimes cares for humans and non-humans, sometimes harms, but is always interdependent, in a mutual, relational co-becoming. As narrated above, the entangled waterscapes of the Tagus demonstrate the ways that water as an ambiguous care-giver and care-taker of multiple more-than-human assemblages, also engender a non-innocent process of co-becoming. These often-contradictory relations of mutuality also emerged clearly in the first section, as we unfolded how waters and gendered subjectivities co-constitute one another-or intra-act-in the wastewaterscape of Pravah in ambiguous, non-innocent ways.

If ethics are embedded in the everyday life of all beings, which unfolds over and through diverse temporalities (Rose, 2012) and socionatural flows of power (Nightingale, 2011), the multiplicity and mobilities of water as it percolates through rocks, soils and bodies, is itself ethically infused. The complexity of ethics within this wider frame of "multispecies knots" cannot therefore be reduced to analysis of a particular encounter between "human" faces, nor as Barbara Davy ( 2007) argues, the requirement of human recognition or legitimisation of the other that this moment implies. The waters of Pravah and the Tagus, in their multiple forms, both continuously enable and disable life; they both take and give life (Bawaka Country et al., 2013). Therefore, to build on Rose's ( 2012) and Davy's ( 2007) arguments, ethics, we suggest, are provoked, but not through a particular encounter between knowing ethical selves. Rather ethical relations emerge through dwelling within more-than-human interdependencies.6 Thinking with the waters of Pravah and the Tagus demonstrates the uneven politics of dwelling within more-than-human interdependencies. Teasing out the ways in which water entangles humans enables us to think beyond human-centric ethical practices and implications, and to conceive of ethics as embedded within the co-constitution of embodied subjectivities, within processes of more-than-human co-becoming, creating for us new questions about interdependencies, caring and the kinds of narratives we tell about those co-becomings.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have explored different ways of grappling with the more-than-human, focusing on the politics of interdependencies through situated entanglements with water. We have done so by juxtaposing two cases that are geographically distant and working on different scales of operation. Human-water relations in the village of Pravah, in Maharashtra, and the flow of the Tagus River, in Spain, shape differentiated and ever-changing embodied subjectivities (including those of the researchers): a process of co-becoming that has specific implications for how we understand and engage with more-than-human interdependencies and therefore ethics.

Drawing on FPE and other allied disciplines, we started our journey of grappling with the more-than-human by acknowledging the importance of unpacking nature/society binaries, the symbolic and material boundaries that maintain them and the power dynamics in which they are enrolled. We thus framed more-than-human interdependencies from an understanding of relationality as entangled, multiple and situated (Nightingale, 2011; Rowe, 2005). Understood as interdependent and entangled, the more-than-human forces us to look beyond distinct individuals, supposedly separate from ecologies and other beings. Therefore, it becomes important to attend to the specific and situated characteristics of such relations as the basis for theorising. To unpack these characteristics of more-than-human interdependency, we found it useful to interweave FPE with STS and post-human scholarship: it helped us attend to the specific affordances of water (water percolates, contaminates, transports sediments and algae, etc.), which play a role in shaping differentiated gendered embodied subjectivities and, conversely, how water is signified.

Two main points emerged as we walked through Pravah with women farmers and along the flows of the Tagus River. Firstly, more-than-human relations, and especially human-water relations, are ambiguous, troubling and never innocent. They create differentiated possibilities of well-being and illness, both for human and more-than-human actors. Secondly, as the authors, we actively co-enact the more-than-human relations we describe and theorise about. And this has ethical and political implications, not least because what we can say about the more-than-human is always partial, mediated by the social, by our (human) ways of making sense of the world. For instance, the focus on the interdependency of women farmers and (waste)water in Pravah is a specific political choice to challenge the processes through which experiences of women farmers from multiple castes, their knowledges and practices in relation to (waste)water, are marginalised and/or silenced; and to interweave feminist struggles with environmental concerns in Maharashtra. The story of the Tagus takes on a different positionality, embodied within the hydrosocial territory it narrates. The process of knowing and becoming with the Tagus invariably collides with other divergent forms of co-becoming that create an emotional and sensorial rejection of processes that make specific territories. Nonetheless this same process also informs a situated politics, one which demands an acknowledgement of how everyone and everything that is part of the more-than-human co-become in ways that defy anthropocentric modes of (dis)ordering the world (Halberstam, 2020).

This chapter therefore illuminates the ways water relations are ethically infused processes of co-becoming. In illustrating the emergent ambiguity of more-than-human interdependency, the chapter contributes to troubling the neat moral boundaries that constrain the multiplicity of more-than-human ethical relations within spheres of privileged human moral reasoning (Richardson-Ngwenya & Nightingale, 2018; Tronto, 1993). Through highlighting the politics of interdependencies that animate the multiple waters along the Tagus and in Pravah, and exploring our own role as researchers in the narration of such, we have also sought to question the nature of ethics as something bounded by human reason. These particular narrations of co-becoming with water highlight the importance of empirically unpacking the complexity of embodied waters and how they shape not only economic and agricultural possibilities, but also every day, embodied senses of well-being, illness and change in contemporary waterscapes. Exploring more-than-human relations therefore involves thinking with the situatedness and embodiment of such relations, thus revealing the ways in which power flows and plays across what often appear as distinct bodies, spheres or scales. In doing so, these intersecting relations and an understanding of our own entanglement in them as researchers, contributes to FPE, STS and philosophies that seek to disorder or blur the boundaries that constrain life and deeper understandings of its more-than-human interdependencies.

Funding

This chapter was funded by the Wellbeing Ecology Gender and cOmmunities Innovation Training Network (WEGO-ITN) funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764908-WEGO 2018-2021.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Nick Bourguignon

2. IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands

Irene Leonardelli

3. University of Passau, Passau, Germany

Enid Still

4. University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

Ingrid L. Nelson

5. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Andrea J. Nightingale

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Irene Leonardelli .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

1. International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus, University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

Wendy Harcourt

2. University CLAEH, Montevideo, Uruguay

Ana Agostino

3. University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

Rebecca Elmhirst

4. Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Marlene Gómez

5. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Panagiota Kotsila

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Bourguignon, N., Leonardelli, I., Still, E., Nelson, I.L., Nightingale, A.J. (2023). More-Than-Human Co-becomings: The Interdependencies of Water, Embodied Subjectivities and Ethics. In: Harcourt, W., Agostino, A., Elmhirst, R., Gómez, M., Kotsila, P. (eds) Contours of Feminist Political Ecology. Gender, Development and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_6

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More-Than-Human Co-becomings: The Interdependencies of Water, Embodied Subjectivities and Ethics

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In this chapter, we explore the politics of interdependencies through situated entanglements with water. Framing more-than-human interdependencies within feminist political ecology means starting from an understanding of relationality. Drawing on research with waters...

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"In relation to the human body, the archive as a form of organization can be understood as the techno-media arsenal that has historically shaped bodies and subjects and continues to shape identities, modes of action, power relations, and communities. The archive functions as an epistemological regime. It consists of systems of representation, discourses, institutions, conventions, practices, and cultural agreements. It determines which bodies, genders, and sexualities become visible and which do not, which count culturally, socially, and economically, and which are considered useless for society. After all, bodies are not simply given but are produced through processes of description, molding, modeling, imitation, and representation. The body is never a singular entity. Some bodies were granted the status of political subjects, which was denied to other bodies (cf. Foucault, Butler, Mbembe). In this sense, the archive gathers different documents and datasets that have shaped concepts of the body at different historical moments, ensuring that the norm is derived from the average and distinguishing the normal from the pathological. It is noteworthy that the evaluative differentiation between the normal, the normality, and the abnormal circa 1850—not coincidentally around the same time as the invention of photography—followed the conception of nature and the natural a century earlier. Scientific disciplines such as medicine, psychology, and sociology, as well as aesthetic productions, have drawn and continue to draw on established parameters of physical, mental, and psychological health and conforming social behaviors, reproducing and idealizing them both deliberately and implicitly. Anatomy, race, gender, sexuality, as well as physical, psychological, and social abilities/disabilities of a subject were most clearly defined in taxonomizing ethnic, colonial, racializing, or classifying (analog) photographs of bodily, physiognomic, and gender measurements. Such taxonomies continue in biometric data collection. Even with so-called AI, these frameworks are by no means obsolete, since their algorithms depend on pre-normalized visual data (cf. Chude-Sokei).

With digital media, the understanding of the archive as a structured collection and organized inventory at a specific location has shifted and become fluid with the verb »to archive,« meaning to store and evaluate the data constantly produced by users. Regarding the development of media, the (analog) documentation of results (known as records in the scientific or medical context) seems to have been replaced by algorithmically controlled image diagnoses. But is that true? Just think of how shocking the first X-ray images were, with their visual revelation of previously invisible structures, such as skeletons or lungs, without physical, medical intervention. At that time, an innovative technology created a new dispositif of the body insofar as the body’s interior and surface were no longer categorically separated but had to be understood as respective interfaces between inside and outside, representation and production. The triangulation between body, world, and (optical) technologies is thus not only an achievement of the digital age. However, digital technologies have increased the speed of mutual feedback and its consequences. The experience of the sick individual being abstracted into a sum of pixels in automated diagnostic imaging procedures is in tension with the demand to think of a collective body, also for the psycho-medical view of the body. Its condition are again certain ›critical‹ abstractions. Conceived as a social, cultural and political, in short, planetary whole, this common body must encompass subjective and collective actions together with their underlying structures in such a way that its inherent inequalities—economic, social, gender, sexual, ethnic and skin color-related—are no longer implicitly embodied by the universalized white, male, Western subject.

For our project, the archive is to be understood in its general sense and not as a concrete institution at a specific location. Rather, the archive encompasses the documentary and the projective, the physical and material of alphanumeric and photographic, video, and sound recordings, as well as the virtual and imaginary of the algorithm. An established manual such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (in its 2022 revised edition of 2013, the DSM-5-TR) as a globally recognized directory of mental illnesses and anxiety disorders, even more than its classification system, must relate to the findings of the young leading discipline, neuroscience (Malabou, Angerer). The recent psychopathologies are also related to the pessimistic prediction of a »new necropolitical alliance between colonial patriarchy and new pharmacopornographic technologies,« toward which the medicalization of so-called »psychiatric pathologies« is already heading today (cf. Preciado).

Neuroscientific approaches have become indispensable in relation to concepts of the body and the subject, since the brain and computer are considered structurally similar in terms of collecting, networking, and connecting. We ourselves constantly archive our every participation or movement, from eating and sleeping habits to heart rate (cf. Halpern), using smart records. With the promise of optimization, this data, which conveys the impression of individual statistics, is scientifically, technically, commercially, or communicatively evaluated and utilized. As has been discussed in the wake of Covid-19, a higher resolution of data would possibly also mean more effective management of pandemics.

From a cultural-historical and contemporary perspective, the conference (HFBK Hamburg, April 25 through 27, 2024) and publication aim to critically examine both the psycho-physically and mentally »information organ« called the »body« and the »data body« (cf. Hayles, Koopman), all the while interrogating which archives have enforced certain body images and discourses. We will ask how the body—as an individual and trans-generational, long-term repository of often invisible injuries from disasters such as radioactive contamination, war, authoritarianism, flight, and migration—is depicted and how it becomes audible. We will also debate what alternative scientific approaches are available, as well as what a subversive fictionalization and virtualization of the body, its organs, and functions can achieve, as well as the recognition of its ghosts (cf. Gordon). In relation to the political, philosophical, and ethical concept of vulnerability (cf. Butler), injuries appear differently as physical lesions and as psychological traumas, when we currently witness wars and totalitarian movements: Violence and hatred that inscribe themselves into individual bodies as pain, suffering and wounding, destroying them and at the same time being ›archived‹ in the communal body. An archive understood in this way, with its personal and official documentation, also adds to various public and secret historical databases of the military-medical complex.

Archives of the Body – The Body in Archiving is not about advocating cultural pessimism regarding digital technology and AI, nor algorithmic determinism, but rather about configuring a potential for political and aesthetic resistance and activism against the dominance of the normal, and thus the normed and normative, from within the archive. On the scientific side, for instance, there is neurodiversity. Instead of the previous assessment of developmental disorders, it now recognizes variations in brain development, and a new understanding of the fragile semantics, for example of aphasia and its implication in trauma (cf. Malabou).

Recent exhibitions related to this topic include Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea (Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2022) and Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer: An Exhibit on Queer/Disability History, Activism, and Culture (Schwules Museum, Berlin 2022). Arch of Hysteria: Between Madness and Ecstasy updated recently in Salzburg, uses positions from contemporary art to update the psychosocially revolting hysterical disposition traditionally attributed to women*. Future Bodies from a Recent Past (Munich, 2022) examined the intertwining of body and technology in sculpture from a prescient historical perspective. With its focus on artistic research, our project brings questions raised within these projects into a new form. Students from the HFBK will present an exhibition with their works on the body as an archive from a multicultural perspective. These projects have been developed over several semesters."

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Archives of the Body examines the relationship between bodies and media in medicine, psychology, culture and politics.

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"Speculation" a word and a practice that are each described and defined in different ways. For me, it may be used as a synonym of "imagination", "fabulation" (e.g., "critical fabulation"), "narration" and even "fiction". It has the potential to renegotiate our knowledge about the past as well as the future.

It is defined this way by The Britannica Dictionary "ideas or guesses about something that is not known".

Stefano Harney talks in this manner about 2Speculative Practice": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOQrvp6Pz-0

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Stefano Harney part 1 on Speculative Practice in Theory

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BAVO's publication on over-identification: https://www.bavo.biz/cultural-activism-today-strategies-of-overidentification

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One strand of thinking around publicness addresses the intercessions between the degeneration of democracy's foundations in solidarity and equality and the erosion of public goods.

Public goods can be broadly understood as an infrastructure, but potentially one whereby one person's usage is not harmful to the capacity of others to also benefit from the provision of that infrastructure and its component goods. Such infrastructures of public goods may generally be understood to include not-for-profit provision of education, health, defence, protection, and culture as provided by the state or privately.

The recalibration, via economic neoliberalisation, of governmentality - as a system of reason - to privilege entrepreneurship and profit, deregulation, tax dismissal and individualism - can result in social, economic and political disinvestment in public goods, and their premise in mutual access.

Here political theorist Wendy Brown, discusses recent shifts since the 2015 publication of her book, Undoing the Demos: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/rights-without-bounds-wendy-brown/

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RIFF: Hongjohn Lin's "The Curatorial Thing"

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RIFF: Hongjohn Lin's "The Curatorial Thing"

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In this article from the Taiwanese online journal, Curatography, Hongjohn Lin looks at the tensions between 'the curatorial' and 'curating' to conceive of what he refers to as curating's 'thing-ness'.

https://curatography.org/5-2-en/

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This is the 2.0 version of the "Research Dissensus Glossary". (The first test version is here.) What is new is that we have adopted a new labeling system for entries. Each entry is now identified by the editorial team as either:

INSTANCE: a case or an example of the relevant term being used or at work in some way, but not a gloss as such.

GLOSS: an expansion of the relevant term that indicates aspects of usage, meaning, etymology and/or context.

DISSGLOSS: an expansion of the relevant term that fully addresses an aspect of dissensus in the use of the term, specifically how the term is contested

RIFF: something that does not fully gloss the term but is not simply an instance of use, but something that explores and/or plays in and around the key term in an interesting and suggestive way.

GUIDE: a post that has the function of guiding the use of the glossary and providing context, rather than acting as a glossary entry in its own right.

The previous iteration is archived here: RDG1.0

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"Imagine the graffiti writer. He swings his arm up over his head following the vertical extension of his body, then sweeps it in a half moon back down to his feet. His gesture, extended by the length of a spray-can, leaves behind a haloed line of paint, a D on the wall. In the magnified scope of the graffiti gesture, writing affords the writer an opportunity to impress the individual shape and vitality of the body’s motor power onto the contours of the cultural sign. Yet if the writer performs the motion repeatedly, his own body will eventually be inscribed, the muscles and ligaments physiologically altered, by the gestural routine that expresses and confines his body at the very same time." from Noland, Carrie. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Carrie Noland investigates questions such as: "If our agency is governed by systèmes de signification (in one account) or anonymous power structures (in another), then why do variation, innovation, and resistance

occur? Why do scripts differ and meanings evolve? In short, why aren’t humans more like machines?" Noland's genealogy is related to the question of individuation (how subjectivity arises). She claims that kinesthetic sensations can recursively correct or refine bodily practices, and cause variation and innovation that isn't accounted for elsewhere.

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There are certain people who speak directly into their moment, and others who leave a message for history to decipher, whose work gains in relevance or whose life becomes uncannily meaningful decades after their death. It's hard to think of a better example of the latter right now, in this year of protests and plague, than the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, one of the strangest and most prescient thinkers of the 20th century.

What Reich wanted to understand was the body itself: why you might want to escape or subdue it, why it remains a naked source of power. His wild life draws together aspects of bodily experience that remain intensely relevant now, from illness to sex, anti-fascist direct action to incarceration. The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin read Reich, as did many of the second-wave feminists. Susan Sontag wrote Illness As Metaphor as a riposte to his theories about health, while Kate Bush's song "Cloudbusting" immortalises his battle with the law, its insistent, hiccupping refrain - "I just know that something good is going to happen" - conveying the compelling utopian atmosphere of his ideas.

Reich believed that the emotional and the political directly impact our bodily experience, and he also thought that both realms could be improved, that Eden could even at this late juncture be retrieved. He was vilified in his own era, sometimes for good reason, but many of his ideas still hum and wriggle with life.

His story begins in Vienna, in the wake of the first world war. As a young man, he was Freud's most brilliant protege ( der beste Kopfe, the best mind in psychoanalysis). But in the early 1920s, he had a heretical revelation. As he listened to his patients speak, his attention kept straying to their bodies, lying guarded and rigid on the couch. What if they were communicating information that couldn't be said in words? Maybe the past wasn't just housed in the memory, as Freud believed, but stowed in the body too.

What Reich was seeing was not a hysterical symptom to be decoded, but rather a kind of clenching and clamping that pervaded a person's entire being: a tension so impenetrable it reminded him of armour. He thought it was a defence against feeling, especially anxiety, rage and sexual excitement. If experiences were too painful and distressing, if emotional expression was forbidden or sexual desire prohibited, then the only alternative was to tense up and lock it away. This process created a permanent physical shield around the vulnerable self, protecting it from pain at the cost of numbing it to pleasure.

Over the next decade, he began to work with his patients' bodies, first verbally and then by touching them, an act totally prohibited in psychoanalysis. To his amazement, he found that when he worked on these regions of tension - the habitual expressions of fright, the clenched fists or rigid bellies - the feelings lodged there could be brought to the surface and released. Patients remembered long-ago incidents of shaming or unwanted invasion, experiencing the fury or despair they'd been unable to feel at the time. This emotional release was often accompanied by a pleasurable rippling feeling Reich called "streaming".

Reich suspected the orgasm was the body's own innate way of releasing tension, dissolving the rigid armour of trauma and unhappiness in a rush of fluid, libidinous energy

It was because of this therapy that I first encountered Reich. In the final year of the 20th century, I came across an advert in a herbal pharmacy in Brighton for a body psychotherapist. I'd had a strong sense since childhood that I was holding something, that I'd locked myself around a mysterious unhappiness, the precise cause of which I didn't understand. I was so rigid and stiff that I flinched when anyone touched me, like a mousetrap going off. Something was stuck and I wanted, nervously, to work it free.

The therapist, Anna, practised in a small, soupy room at the top of her house. There was a professional-looking massage bed in the corner, but the overwhelming impression was of slightly grimy domesticity. Whenever I could, I'd suggest we ditch talking in favour of a massage. I didn't have to undress completely. Anna would don a stethoscope and lightly work at odd places on my body, not kneading but seeming instead to directly command muscles to unclench. Periodically she'd lean over and listen, the bell of her stethoscope pressed against my stomach.

More often than not, I experienced a sense of energy moving through my abdomen and down my legs, where it tingled like jellyfish tentacles. It was a nice feeling, not sexual exactly, but as if an obstinate blockage had been dislodged. I never talked about it and she never asked, but it was part of why I kept coming back: to experience this newly lively, quivering body. When I first read Reich, I immediately recognised his description of streaming. Even now, I can still remember how it felt: as if something too, too solid had been induced to melt, as Hamlet once implored.

Reich had always been intensely interested in sex, and he wondered whether the energy he'd unleashed was the same thing that Freud termed libido. At the time, Freud taught that all symptoms sprang from disturbances in sexuality, a premise Reich's patients certainly bore out. If undischarged sexual energy caused neurosis, mightn't it follow that the discharge of sexual energy was in itself a healing force? Reich suspected the orgasm was the body's own innate way of releasing tension, dissolving the rigid armour of trauma and unhappiness in a rush of fluid, libidinous energy.

Wilhelm Reich, pictured in the mid 1950s. Photograph: AP

If he was right, then sex mattered, and not simply as a procreative force. In the early 1930s, Reich coined the term "the sexual revolution" to describe the universe of happiness and love that would arise once people had shaken off their shackles, divesting the world of its punitive, prurient attitudes. He was undoubtedly naive in this, as the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault observes in The History of Sexuality. If the orgasm is so powerful, Foucault asks, why is it that the vastly expanded sexual liberties of the intervening years have failed to dissolve capitalism or topple the patriarchy, despite all Reich's ardent predictions to the contrary?

It's an easy criticism to make, but it doesn't mean Reich's utopianism was completely without solid, practical foundations. If people had access to safe sex, and especially to contraception and safe, legal abortion, they were far less likely to produce unwanted children, or to find themselves shackled by poverty or unhappy marriages. As he pointed out in The Sexual Revolution, 20,000 women a year died in Germany because of illegal abortions between 1920 and 1932, while 75,000 became ill with sepsis. You don't need to believe in the magical power of the orgasm to see why a sexual revolution might be desirable, especially for women.

But Reich's Steckenpferd ( hobbyhorse), as Freud called it, might not have had such grave consequences for their relationship had it not coincided with his growing conviction of the need for social change. Many of his patients were working class. Listening to their stories, he realised the problems he was seeing weren't just a consequence of childhood experience but social factors such as poverty, poor housing, domestic violence and unemployment. Each individual was plainly subject to larger forces, which could cause just as much trouble as Freud's central site of interest, the crucible of the family.

What Reich longed to do was treat the cause. "From now onward, the great question was: Where does that misery come from? While Freud developed his death instinct theory, which said 'the misery comes from inside', I went out, out where the people were." In 1927, he read Das Kapital with as much amazed recognition as he had once read Freud. He was gripped by Marx's account of capitalism as a brutal system of exchange that converted people into commodities, objects of arbitrarily fluctuating value. The notion of alienated bodies, estranged from their own needs and desires, chimed with what he'd seen in his own patients, lying stiff and rigid on the couch.

Therapy was not enough. Politics was not enough. Only sex was a sufficiently powerful force to reshape society

Both psychoanalysis and communism were full of potential for understanding human unhappiness and expanding human freedom, Reich thought, but each had major blind spots. The problem with psychotherapy was that it insisted on treating the individual as if their pain occurred in a vacuum, unmediated by the society they inhabited or the politics that governed their lives. As for Marxism, it failed to recognise the importance of emotional experience, not least the trouble caused by shame and sexual repression, especially to women. Therapy was not enough. Politics was not enough. Only sex was a sufficiently powerful force to reshape society. As he explained in his memoir, People in Trouble, he believed freeing sex from centuries of repression would change the world.

A National socialist demonstration in Berlin, in front of the Brandenburger Gate circa 1931. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

In 1930 he moved to Berlin, where out of the wreckage of war there had arisen a great flowering of new ideas about sexuality. He was a prominent, passionate figure in the city, lecturing crowds of thousands. Young people in particular came to him in droves, seeking help with the difficulty of reconciling their own desires with their anxiety and ignorance around pregnancy and disease.

This liberation work came to an abrupt halt when Hitler seized power in 1933. The free expression of sexuality was immediately a target of the new Nazi regime, and many of Reich's allies were arrested and imprisoned. A known communist and anti-fascist, Reich went on the run, spending weeks hiding in hotels under false names before escaping over the mountains to Austria, then coming back, perversely, mysteriously, to his watched apartment in Berlin to pack a suitcase and escape again.

He spent that autumn in Denmark, poring over Mein Kampf and writing The Mass Psychology of Fascism, his landmark work of analysis of the Nazis' appeal. In it, he explained how the patriarchal family acted as a unit of indoctrination, training people from childhood to submit to authority. The Nazis burned it on pyres, alongside all his other published work.

People in Trouble was the first of Reich's books I read, and it bowled me over. Reich was not a beautiful writer, like Freud. He often sounded boastful, even paranoid, but there was an urgency that tugged me in. It was as if he was writing from the battleground, hunched over his notebook, sketching out high-stakes possibilities for enlarging the freedoms of real people's lives. His account chimed with my own experiences of becoming involved in activism, the excitements and frustrations of trying to agitate for political change.

I'd grown up in the 1980s as a gender non-conforming child in a gay family, under the malign rule of Section 28, a homophobic law that forbade schools from teaching "the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". To know that this was how the state regarded your own family was to receive a powerful education in how bodies are positioned in a hierarchy of value, their freedoms privileged or curtailed according to more or less inescapable attributes, from skin colour to sexuality. Each time I went to therapy I could feel the legacy of that period in my own body, as knots of shame and fear and rage that were difficult to express, let alone dissolve.

'I'd grown up in the 1980s as a gender non-conforming child in a gay family' ... Olivia Laing. Photograph: Matt Writtle/Evening Standard/eyevine

But if my childhood taught me about the body as an object whose freedom is limited by the world, it also gave me a sense of the body as a force for freedom in its own right. I went to my first Gay Pride at the age of 11, and the feeling of all those marching bodies on Westminster Bridge lodged inside me, too, a somatic sensation unlike anything I'd previously experienced. It seemed obvious to me that bodies on the streets were how you changed the world. As a teenager terrified by the oncoming apocalypse of the climate crisis, I started attending protests, becoming so immersed in the environmental direct action movement that I dropped out of university in favour of a treehouse in a Dorset woodland scheduled to be destroyed for a new road.

I loved living in the woods, but using my own body as a tool of resistance was gruelling as well as intoxicating. The Criminal Justice Act had drastically curtailed the right to protest, just as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill threatens to do now. Policing had become more aggressive and several people I knew were facing long prison sentences for the new crime of aggravated trespass. Freedom came at a cost, and it seemed that the cost was bodily, too, the loss of physical liberty an omnipresent threat. Like many activists, I burned out. In the summer of 1998, I sat down in a graveyard in Penzance and filled out an application for a degree in herbal medicine.

Reich's ideas seemed so relevant to my times that I couldn't understand why I hadn't heard about him, either in protest circles or during my training as a herbalist. It wasn't until much later that I realised the reason he isn't more respected or discussed is that the excesses of the second half of his life have overwhelmed the first. The radical, incisive ideas about sex and politics that he developed in Europe before the war have been almost buried beneath the far more dismaying notions developed in his years of exile, which range from pseudo-scientific theories of disease to a "spacegun" that controls the weather.

Mary Henderson, the office manager of the Wilhelm Reich Museum, displays an 'orgone' accumulator. Photograph: AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty/AP

When Reich emigrated to the United States in 1939, a refugee from Hitler's Europe, he didn't establish himself as a psychoanalyst or an activist, but as a scientist; albeit one proudly uninterested in the process of peer review, the testing ground of all scientific achievement. Shortly after his arrival, he claimed to have discovered the universal energy that animates all life. He called it orgone, and in the laboratory of his house in New York he developed a pseudoscientific machine to harness its healing powers. Given the consequences it would have for its maker, it's ironic that Reich's universal healing device was a wooden cell slightly smaller than a standard phone booth, in which you sat in stately self-confinement.

Reich believed the orgone accumulator could automate the work of liberation, obviating the need for laborious person-to-person therapy. He also hoped it might cure disease, particularly cancer. This latter claim triggered an exposé, which in turn drew him to the attention of the Food and Drug Authority, initiating an investigation into the medical efficacy of the orgone accumulator that lasted almost a decade.

On 7 May 1956, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for refusing to stop selling his invention. His books were burned, in what remains the only federally sanctioned book burning on American soil. The following spring he was sent to Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where six months later he died of a heart attack in his cell, a brutal end for somebody whose life was dedicated to enlarging the freedoms of others.

The year Donald Trump came to power, I returned to Reich. I felt as if his troubled life formed a pattern that was in itself illuminating, and I was haunted by the sense that there was something vital buried in his ideas. Why had his work gone so catastrophically astray, and what did it tell us about the larger struggles in which he'd played such a dynamic, ardent role? As each successive year has passed, bringing revelations of systemic misogyny and racism, followed by the mass uprisings of Black Lives Matter and a global plague, Reich has only felt more relevant. He had a knack for asking the right questions, even when his own conclusions were flagrantly wrong.

Reich thought hateful and cruel behaviours were a consequence of the unequal and deforming systems in which people were forced to live

While his later theories about health are pseudoscientific, his belief that our bodies are burdened by both emotional trauma and social conditions remains apposite. As the Covid epidemic has demonstrated, even something as supposedly neutral as a virus doesn't affect all bodies equally, but instead exposes the way that physical vulnerability intersects with poverty and racism.

As for sex, there's a lot more to Reich than his latter-day reputation as the orgasm man. When he was 11, his mother had an affair. His father found out, and was so physically abusive that after a year she killed herself to escape him. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the horrors his mother underwent drove Reich's work as a sexual liberationist, opening his eyes to the consequences of patriarchal models of ownership, as well as restrictive attitudes to sex. As Andrea Dworkin put it, he was "that most optimistic of sexual liberationists, the only male one to abhor rape really". None of the revelations of the # MeToo movement would have surprised him. When he talked about the sexual revolution, he didn't mean a fantasia of endless ejaculation so much as a world in which women could experience sexual pleasure without fear of retribution, violence or death.

Violence also woke Reich up to the ways in which not all bodies are protected by the state, a truth that Black Lives Matter has viscerally demonstrated continues in our own era. In 1927, he witnessed a workers' uprising in Vienna that was viciously suppressed by the police, culminating in 89 deaths and thousands of injuries. The spectacle of the brutalised crowd and the robotic policemen haunted him: a vision, though he didn't know it yet, of what would soon befall Europe, and continues to be enacted around the world.

What he saw on the streets of Vienna was not, he was certain, the natural or inevitable order of being. It was the product of patriarchal capitalism, which established a rigid, immobilising, authoritarian model of relationships from the moment a child was born, and it had culminated in a massacre. Reich could not believe humans were naturally hateful and cruel. He thought these behaviours were a consequence of the unequal and deforming systems in which they were forced to live - of which I would argue that white supremacy is the most damaging and dangerous.

The tragedy of Reich's life is that nearly a hundred years later, these systems remain as powerful as ever. The better world he dreamed of has not yet transpired. There is no republic of bodies, free to migrate between states.

Nor can it be said that this is Reich's tragedy alone. From feminism to gay liberation to the civil rights movement, the struggles of the last century were at heart about the right to be free of oppression based on the kind of body you inhabited. And yet every day people are killed, hurt, hobbled because of bodily markers like skin colour or gender or sexuality.

Does this mean the dream of freedom has failed? No. It is possible to remake the world. What you cannot do is assume that any change is permanent. Everything can be undone, and so every victory must be refought. Freedom is a shared endeavour: a collaboration built by many hands over many centuries of time. The free body isn't just a beautiful idea. As Reich knew, it requires work, a labour every single living person can choose to hinder or advance.

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Wilhelm Reich: the strange, prescient sexologist who sought to set us free

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He believed orgasms could be a healing force and coined the term 'sexual revolution'. Reich's understanding of the body is vital in our age of protests and patriarchy, writes Olivia Laing

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Olivia Lang's book takes many perspectives on bodily experiences, from sick bodies, imprisoned bodies, bodies that practice or are subjected to violence, and bodies in groups. She emphasizes that the body is connected to everything and a central part of every struggle for freedom.

She draws on Wilhelm Reich theories about sexual oppressed feelings. "Reich argued that the reason why German fascism (i.e., Nazism) was chosen over communism was that of increased sexual repression in Germany – as opposed to the somewhat more liberal (post-revolutionary) Russia." - Wikipedia

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Order in the UK: Amazon, Bookshop.org, Foyles, Waterstones (signed edition)

Order in the US: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop

Coming soon: China, Germany, Italy, Korea, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, Poland

Read: Guardian extract, FT profile, Vanity Fair diary, i-D interview, Dazed interview, 5 books that inspired Everybody, on writing Everybody

Watch: Everybody discussions with Maggie Nelson, Sarah Schulman, Helen Mort and Susie Orbach
From the reviews...
'Laing's gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words, she is among the most significant voices of our time.' Financial Times

'Laing's impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body's right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. Intensely moving, vital and artful.'

' Everybody possesses a looseness, richness, and abundance of originality...One does not expect a political study to perform such sharp close readings of art and literature, or to describe emotions so elegantly. Line by line and thought by thought, Laing writes with surgical discipline.'

'Laing is a truly thrilling thinker, with an impressively roving intellectual eye.'

'Radically subversive and learned' The Times Literary Supplement

'A dizzying ride...both timely and beguiling' The Sunday Times

'It will delight new and loyal readers alike...an ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum' Evening Standard

'A quintessential book for the precarious moment we've found ourselves in... multilayered and masterfully structured... Everybody should be required reading for anyone who cares about not just where we are now, but the future.' Washington Post

'A fleet, gracious tour of bodily distress and joy... Laing writes in great looping sentences, both precise and evocative.' NPR

'We are lucky to be living in the time of Olivia Laing... to spend time with Laing as she works through a topic, finding the unlikeliest of connective ideas wherever she looks, is to come away with a view of the world that-if not exactly clearer-is strange and rich and profound.' LitHub

'Daring and complicated... The method of Everybody [is] framed as an extended conversation between the author and her sources, in which De Sade blurs into Reich, who blurs into Sontag, and back again. The key to all this movement is that it also invites us to participate in the conversation.'

'A beautiful, strange and sprawling meditation on the relationship between the body and freedom.' New Statesman

'Dreaming beyond conventional wisdom and restrictive visions, Laing emboldens us to seek liberation across difference in the face of turmoil. Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation.' Boston Globe

' Everybody travels buoyantly through a rich swathe of cultural history to investigate bodily freedom and its curtailments... It's a formidable undertaking, one that Laing executes savvily, her plainly diligent research synthesized in lucid, coolly urgent prose.' 4 Columns

'This lucid foray into some of life's deepest questions astonishes.' Publishers Weekly starred review

'Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring' Kirkus starred review

'Laing's finely crafted blend of incisive memoir and biography vitalize this unique chronicle of the endless struggle "to be free of oppression based on the kind of body" one inhabits, a work of fresh and dynamic analysis and revelation.' Booklist starred review

'Olivia Laing has a genius for juxtaposing ideas and lives - of artists, writers, thinkers, her own too - so that they illuminate each other in fresh, sometimes startling ways. This new book is a triumph. It bristles with energy and understanding as it charts the body's pleasures and pains, its fragilities, and endurance in the long 20th century. This really is a book for everybody.' Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad

'This is an astonishing project, written with equal parts stirring passion and capable intellect. Laing puts into words experiences I had never before seen in print, and the world is better for it. I love this book.' Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias

' Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought. Brainy, open-hearted and bold.' Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse

'Laing's particular gift lies in her unique ability to line up unlikely juxtapositions - of artists, ideas and works - and then draw clear and illuminating insights from such constellations. What her earlier work did for loneliness, this book does for liberation.' Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism

'Reading Everybody felt like hanging out with my absolute smartest friend having, somehow, the precise conversation I need to have in this historical moment. Olivia Laing's mind is a thrill to watch . . . Rare is the book that makes you feel more alive just in reading it, but Everybody does just that.' Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body

'A provocative inquiry into the body's power and vulnerability . . . casting fresh light on the unending struggles for freedom and autonomy.' Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

'Through [Laing's] incisive lens, the body - that knot of mind, matter, culture, and society that we dwell inescapably within - becomes almost impossibly fascinating.' Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

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Order in the UK: Amazon, Bookshop.org, Foyles, Waterstones (signed edition) Order in the US: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop Coming soon: China, Germany, Italy, Korea, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, Poland Read: Guardian extract, FT profile, Vanity Fair diary, i-D interview, Dazed interview, 5 books that inspired Everybody , on writing Everybody Watch: Everybody discussions with Maggie Nelson, Sarah Schulman, Helen Mort and Susie Orbach From the reviews...

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You are welcome to propose new terms for the glossary by making a post here and indicating which terms and why it would be useful to add these

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A "dissensus" glossary contains the proposition that the glossing of a term will include consideration of how a term is contested or where there are divergent ways of describing a term. When making an entry, please consider whether you have included this twofold aspect: (i) Is there any divergence or disagreement in how the particular term is defined, used or expanded? (ii) If so, is there anything at stake or is there anything consequential to the different ways of explaining, using, qualifying the term?

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GUIDE: Criteria for a new term to be added

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GUIDE: Criteria for a new term to be added

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The proposed criteria for inclusion is that a term has some kind of currency in our discussions, being used by more than just one researcher in our community. When we add a new word, we will add a new column/channel, and these channels are arranged alphabetically. Using terms from any language is welcome, the key criterion is that the word has a usage within our research discussions and exchanges. The first words included are:

aesthetic,

archive,

bodily experience / embodied / embodiment,

discrete,

discipline / domain / field,

document,

ecology/ecological,

ethics,

linear/non-linear,

mimesis,

neoliberalism,

performative/performativity,

poesis,

posthumanism,

practice,

representation,

resistance,

social / socially engaged...

speculation

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Many terms from different languages, as well as familiar terms used in new contexts, make up the vocabulary of documenta fifteen.

Building social relationships and questioning power dynamics is essential to the lumbung practice. This also includes expanding the way language is used and understanding it as a tool to develop new ideas and perspectives. Furthermore, documenta fifteen stands for polyphony, and using terms from different languages is an integral part of that.

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ruangrupa ist die künstlerische Leitung der documenta fifteen. Die Arbeit des 2000 im indonesischen Jakarta gegründeten Kollektivs beruht auf einer ganzheitlichen sozialen, räumlichen und persönlichen Praxis, die stark mit der indonesischen Kultur verbunden ist, in der Freundschaft, Solidarität, Nachhaltigkeit und Gemeinschaft eine zentrale Bedeutung haben. „ruangrupa" bedeutet frei übersetzt „Kunstraum" oder „Raumform".

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In collaboration with Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin), Goethe-Institut Athen has produced a glossary on the subject of “property” in the form of a series of ten short video clips. Drawing on books from the collection of the Hopscotch Reading Room, the videos examine various aspects of the topic from as global and non-Western a perspective as possible.

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In collaboration with Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin), Goethe-Institut Athen has produced a glossary on the subject of "property" in the form of a series of ten short video clips. Drawing on books from the collection of the Hopscotch Reading Room, the videos examine various aspects of the topic from as global and non-Western a perspective as possible.
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In collaboration with Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin), Goethe-Institut Athen has produced a glossary on the subject of "property" in the form of a series of ten short video clips. Drawing on books from the collection of the Hopscotch Reading Room, the videos examine various aspects of the topic from as global and non-Western a perspective as possible.

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INSTANCE: making matters - A Vocabulary for Collective Arts

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INSTANCE: making matters - A Vocabulary for Collective Arts

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"Making Matters" studies how visual artists and designers are addressing pressing ecological and social issues through collaboration. Glossary suggest terms beyond traditional practices, working together with non-artists and blurring the lines between art, design, activism, and research. https://valiz.nl/en/publications/making-matters

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Writer, curator and organiser Kuba Szreder here applies the ABC format (alphabeticisation, sometimes also called the A-Z format) to an interrogation of precarious working conditions in contemporary art and its prediction for project-based working in freelancing. It operates critically but also as a form of manual.

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' The ABC of the projectariat delivers an essential contribution for examining artistic work in relation to political-theoretically, sociologically and art-theoretically informed perspectives, in order to expose the internal contradictions that have shaped the art world.'
Christoph Chwatal, Springerin

' The ABC of the projectariat lays out starkly the labor that sustains cultural production, and the daily conundrums, mundane and existential, inherent to navigating the many intersecting art worlds ... The book offers a historicized trajectory of care for labor in all its forms, but also allows projectarians a bit of insurgent optimism, in proposing new ways to reconceive our privileged precarity.'
iLiana Fokianaki, Art Agenda

'The text feels like a chat with a trusted friend who understands what actually happens rather than what the P.R. wants you to believe. It gives you the real deal, revealing what theory obscures through its need to make pure architectures.'
Marc Herbst, transversal texts

'Kuba Szreder's ABC of the projectariat asks searching questions of an international art world that promised to change dramatically at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic... [It] shows the possibility of a different art culture, in a way that's practical and pragmatic, and far more concrete than certain institutions' empty rhetoric around (say) COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter.'
Juliet Jacques, Tribune

'Will we ever go back to "normal" again? Should we, even? Hell no, says Kuba Szreder! But during the current interim period in which Gramsci's monsters dwell old certainties shrivel and evaporate. Old power structures suddenly look brittle while new ones are created and vanish as if in a crazy political particle accelerator. In this kind of mayhem Szreder goes back to the A and O of any philosophical thinking - an alphabetical list - trusting that the mess will sort itself out once articulated aloud. From A for "antifascism" to Y for "you are not alone", this is an essential compendium to recalibrate orientations amid the meteoric impacts of current history.'
Hito Steyerl, author of Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

'A radical dictionary of key terms, Kuba Szreder's The ABC of the projectariat critically diagnoses what it means to live and work in the precarious art world. Organised alphabetically into incisive, readable elaborations, the book unpacks timely concepts of domination - neoliberalism, NGOisation, co-optation, entrepreneurs of the self, precarity - and with other vital selections - art strike, interdependence, productive withdrawal and instituting the commons - offers a crucial vocabulary for anti-capitalist transformation. For a more egalitarian, democratic and inclusive world, it's urgent that we learn this language together.'
T. J. Demos, author of Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing

'Kuba Szreda's book is a bracing exposé of the lives and concerns of people who do projects for a living. Yes, it is based on the artist projectariat, but this book will speak to all workers across the world who "run on the fumes" of the recognised economy. This ABC offers critical insight into matters of individual survival, but more importantly it is a primer on strategies for recognising interdependence and living and working otherwise.'
J. K. Gibson-Graham, authors of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities

'The ABC is more than a glossary; it examines the political economies of the global art world, centring on the structural conditions of the projecteriat, its entanglements and interminable uncertainty. Szreder connects the theoretical corpus developed over the last two decades to material reality and lived experience. Looking at everything from the fatigue of hustling to the banality of speed-working and the extractionist practices it leads to, he provides an overview of "the field of contemporary art in the process of its decomposition".'
Vasif Kortun, curator and author

'A long-awaited alphabet, spelling out the real conditions of artistic and creative labour in the age of networks and circulation, but also borders, The ABC of the projectariat is a must-read for anyone studying, and possibly living in, the contemporary art field. A curator and critic known for his imaginative and daring propositions, Kuba Szreder has managed to write the most structurally innovative and (perversely) enjoyable book on the formidable subject of the production of the art field as such. The book's sixty-six entries are sharp, lucid and full of remarkable insights about the life and work of art projectarians - that is, those who create through the ubiquitous project-form. The entries are also incredibly informative, honest and attentive to geopolitics. They combine hands-on experience, theoretical rigour and political situatedness. Insofar as it is almost impossible to think of anyone not working from project to project, and therefore living out as personal burden the social consequences of the global project hegemony (with precarity chief among them), this study is about a way of life as much as about what governs work - our life and our work. Committed to practices of social transformation towards an end of the socio-economic injustice that rules our life and work, The ABC of the projectariat is a unique encounter that will move you - forward.'
Angela Dimitrakaki, author of ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century

'Kuba Szreder's projectarians are a vanguard part of the precariat. We need a new subversive vocabulary for a new progressive politics, and this book provides much of what is needed.'
Guy Standing, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class

'This is an urgent and accessible anatomy of the conditions of art-making today. It vividly conveys the crushing impacts of "the cruel economy of contemporary art" on the material and creative lives of artists while mapping a network of imaginative paths out of it.'
Josh Cohen, author of Not Working: Why We Have to Stop

'From his innovative research with the Free/Slow University of Warsaw to his breakthrough concept of the artistic projectariat, Szreder tenaciously levels our collective attention towards the paradoxes of a cultural economy in crisis, without abandoning hopes for its radical transformation.'
Gregory Sholette, author of Dark Matter and The Artist as Activist

'This book is a weapon for anyone who wants to resist the dominant economy of art. Its voice is situated in the semi-periphery of Europe and resonates with the projectariat from all over the world.'
Zdenka Badovinac, curator and author

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Manchester University Press - The ABC of the projectariat

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The ABC of the projectariat - Browse and buy the Paperback edition of The ABC of the projectariat by Kuba Szreder

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A glossary of terms used when producing books. This glossary includes nouns and verbs.

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Resources → Glossary A Accordion A book structure made without stitches by simply folding a sheet of paper back and forth in page-width increments. Ace Bandage This breathable elastic bandage can be used in bookbinding to tie up the book...

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INSTANCE: Zdenka Badovinac, “My Post-Catastrophic Glossary”

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INSTANCE: Zdenka Badovinac, “My Post-Catastrophic Glossary”

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A personal glossary developed through one's own situated (curatorial) practice.

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INSTANCE: glossary of common knowledge I & II

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INSTANCE: glossary of common knowledge I & II

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https://glossary.mg-lj.si/

The Glossary of Common Knowledge (GCK) is a compilation of art terminology that differs substantially from what is found in the existing literature on art. First, it was a five-year research project by Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) in the frame of L’Internationale confederation, continued by a four-year research project conducted by the same confederation. In collaboration with institutions and individuals from Europe and other parts of the world, over 100 contributors/narrators proposed terms relating to their own practices and contexts, to historical references, political or social situations or L’Internationale projects. The terms were discussed and defined on six referential fields (Historicisation, Subjectivisation, Geopolitics I, Geopolitics II, Constituencies, Commons, and Other Institutionality). The first volume of terms was published in a book in 2018 and the second volume was published in 2022.

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"What could terms such as ‘altergorithm’, 'rewilding’, ‘negentropy’ and ‘technoanimalism’ possibly have in common? The answer lies in the pages of this book: they are all neologisms that attempt to come to terms with the complex ities of the posthuman predicament. Every time we refer to some of these neologisms in the introduction, we will insert the inverted commas, as a way of indexing them and alerting the readers to the specific inception of the terms."

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Dunhuang manuscript (c. 8th century) page from the Yiqiejing yinyi, the oldest extant Chinese dictionary of Buddhist technical terminology (wikipedia)

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INSTANCE: Glossary of Cognitive Activism

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INSTANCE: Glossary of Cognitive Activism

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https://www.balticartcenter.com/projects/botanical-political-dictionary

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INSTANCE: Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities

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INSTANCE: Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities

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available open access: https://rowman.com/webdocs/CriticalConceptsCriticalHumanitiesOA.pdf

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https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVPKA-2

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https://keywords.pitt.edu/williams_keywords.html

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INSTANCE: A Handbook of Theological Terms

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INSTANCE: A Handbook of Theological Terms

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Handbook of Theological Terms, by Van A. Harvey. Allen and Unwin, 1966. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article-abstract/XIX/2/699-b/1669660?redirectedFrom=PDF

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The Kangxi Dictionary (Chinese: 康熙字典; pinyin: Kāngxī zìdiǎn) is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the High Qing, considered from the time of its publishing until the early 20th century to be the most authoritative reference for written Chinese characters. Wanting an improvement upon earlier dictionaries, as well as to show his concern for Confucian culture and to foster standardization of the Chinese writing system, its compilation was ordered by the Kangxi Emperor in 1710, from whom the compendium gets its name. The dictionary was the largest of its kind, containing 47,043 character entries. Around 40% of them were graphical variants, while others were dead, archaic, or found only once in the Classical Chinese corpus. In today's vernacular written Chinese, fewer than a quarter of the dictionary's characters are commonly used.

The text is available in many forms, from Qing dynasty block print editions, to reprints using traditional Chinese bookbinding, to Western-style hardcovers including revisions and ancillary essays, to a digitized version accessible via the internet. (Wikipedia)

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https://hu.tranzit.org/en/research_project/0/2015-08-19/curatorial-dictionary

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Curatorial Dictionary: Unpacking the Oxymoron
An Introduction

TOPIC AND BACKGROUND

The idea and an articulated need of a curatorial dictionary emerged during a reading seminar in preparation for one of the workshops of tranzit.hu's Free School for Art Theory and Practicein Budapest. [1] While discussing and reading about concepts used within international curatorial discourse and practice, we recognized a gnoseological uncertainty: we could clearly point to (or defer to) projects and relevant authors/texts which reflect on the specific concepts; yet-despite the vast amount of writings related to curating-we proved to be unable to determine more general textual surveys about the meanings and conceptual roots of these very notions. After taking a more meticulous look into how concepts work and come about within curatorial discourse, we found that notions, such as performative curating, new institutionalism, or collaboration, are deliberately vague-as they attempt to delineate a particular practice, rather than a theoretical line of inquiry. We, therefore, also recognized that curatorial discourse-as opposed to other theoretical-academic discourses-is extrapolated from practice; concepts which are created are often "propositions [for a certain curatorial] practice," and are "employed to mark out a specific current discourse." [2] We, nevertheless, decided to develop a general, meta-level project through which these concepts, their signification, and discursive formation could be more thoroughly understood, and, at the same time, by which we could also account for their relevancy within curatorial praxis.

At the same time as we detected the inability of curatorial discourse to fully capture curatorial practice, we also identified a cultural and a linguistic-epistemological gap: as native Hungarian speakers, we had to acknowledge that some of the basic concepts in English, such as education, are simply unavailable in Hungarian language; there is no "perfect" equivalent of its English meaning, not just linguistically, but conceptually as well. Moreover, we also wished to question the hybrid language we use in Hungarian-which is the case in many, other than English, languages as well. When talking about curatorial work in Hungarian, the technical terms are given in English, making this discourse more insular and inaccessible for general non-English speakers. It has to be noted that the prevalence of English terms within Hungarian is also connected to fact that so far only a handful of the seminal texts around curating has been translated into Hungarian. [3]

WORKING GROUP AND WORKING METHODOLOGY

Those involved in early discussions about the dictionary came together to form a working group. This included individuals who are active in Hungary within the field of contemporary art, curating, ethnography, visual culture, and education: Balázs Beöthy, Nikolett Erőss, Zsófia Frazon, Eszter Lázár, and Eszter Szakács. Paul O'Neill also contributed to the project as a respondent/advisor.

The gradually emerging format of the dictionary as a research-and, plausibly, also a problematizing tool-was adopted to serve various purposes. On the one hand, it collected and characterized some of the most frequent terms of curatorial discourse in one place. On the other hand, it sought to find meaningful and often missing Hungarian equivalents of these very terms. Correlatively, many of the objectives of this first phase were formed as we worked on the project, rather than following up to a predefined set of aims. During our initial discussions it became clear that compiling an academic-encyclopedic dictionary was not our goal, as the working group wished to go beyond linguistics, semantics, and etymology, to focus not so much on defining the exact or "proper" meanings of the concepts, but on understanding their contexts and relations. The Curatorial Dictionary therefore attempts to delineate the historical, socio-cultural contexts, and artistic processes in which the examined terms appeared, are used, and are given signification by writers. Hence, the project is also a meta-analysis: it looks at how different lines of discourse create meanings-it is writing about writings on curatorial and artistic practices.

DILEMMAS AND WAYS TO CONTINUE THE PROJECT

Understanding curatorial practice and discourse through a dictionary format, however, also raised concerns within the working group. This approach was critiqued for the presumed disparity between the rigid and normative framework of a dictionary and curatorial practice's disposition of being always in flux and moving between different disciplines. It can be argued, nevertheless, that the amount of textual production around curating since the early 1990s calls for analysis [4], and a structuring survey of its elements and modus operandi are pertinent. In its first phase the Curatorial Dictionary is, in several respects, comparable to Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and its revised version. [5] The Keywords project similarly goes beyond a philological-etymological inquiry, and, unlike the undertakings of Oxford-style dictionaries, is concerned with the "connection and interaction" of words, rather than with the "range and variation" of their meanings. [6] Williams, hence, attempts to map out a larger framework of words, a conceptual vocabulary of culture and society.

In attempting to outline a framework of curatorial discourse, Curatorial Dictionary, however, is in no way comprehensive. The selection of the concepts was based on the individual interests, and often divergent opinions, of the working group members; thus, the dictionary is again grounded in discourse. Rather than offering a series of statements, it is based on our dilemmas and debates with one another as well as with publications on the examined concepts. A common interest of the group was to understand correlations and processes when writing the definitions of the terms, which yielded texts permeated with expressions such as "change," "shift," "transition," "transformation," "turn," or "old. vs. new." Furthermore, we wished to be attentive to the relations of individual terms. To this end, the primary medium of the dictionary is an online, open-access website where the visualization contains information also about the relationship between the concepts.

In practical terms, the interpretations of the concepts take the form of short essays-for want of a better genre category-and span in time from the 1960s until today. Within the texts, the contradictory pull between the assumed, surveying "objectivity" of a dictionary, and our simultaneous vested interest as well our sociocultural specificities came especially to the forefront when we attempted to provide examples (projects, exhibitions, institutions, spaces, etc.) for the concepts under discussion. We wanted to go beyond merely reiterating the globally renowned and often-cited projects. Instead we aimed to reference examples that took place in Hungary or in Eastern Europe. However, we came to realize that the concepts we discuss in the dictionary have been predominantly developed in Western Europe and North America and that they might not always be relevant frameworks for interpreting practices which take place, for instance in Hungary or the Eastern European region. In the upcoming phase of the Curatorial Dictionary, we plan-through international collaborations-to differentiate the dominant, "international" curatorial discourse with reflections and practices from various positions. At the same time, we also plan to map the local(ized) manifestations and relevance of the concepts in various geographical and geopolitical regions.

For this current stage of the dictionary project, some of terms, such as interpretation or exhibition display, include more general remarks on practices in Hungary and in the Eastern European region. When writing the texts, it was a consideration that, rather than just relying on the reference materials, we should also reflect upon our artistic-curatorial-museological practices in Hungary. In this we sought to deviate from the practice of citing a series of examples without explanations-although, in some entries, we felt the need to discuss relevant projects. This shift of focus from "project-dropping" to meta-discourse analysis may also be related to the fact that we have not seen many of even the best-known exemplary projects. Nevertheless, we now have easier access to books and articles, which, for us, are often the primary site of encounter for such projects.

Curatorial Dictionary, in many ways, also presents "the curatorial turn," the emergence of curatorial praxis, as composite of various discourses. One can trace the processes of this turn through examining the adjacent discourses on collaboration, exhibition display, curatorial, discursivity, interpretation, or performativity- all of which are equally relevant perspectives on the same line of processes and inquiries taking place since the 1960s within the contemporary art world. What this entails, in turn, is that the curatorial field remains to be a field of contestation, defined and upheld by attempts to legitimize certain types of (curatorial) practices. An important means through which legitimization takes place is writing and publishing.

Eszter Szakács

[1] Curating and the Educational Turn -Seminar with Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson within the framework of the tranzit.hu Free School For Art Theory and Practice, Budapest, June 17-18, 2011.

[2] Simon Sheikh. "Burning from the Inside. New Institutionalism revisited." Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, Thomas Weski Eds. Cultures of the Curatorial, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012: 363.

[3] See Zoltán Kékesi, Eszter Lázár, Tünde Varga. Eds. A gyakorlattól a diskurzusig-Kortárs művészetelméleti szöveggyűjtemény [From Practice to Discourse-Contemporary Art Theory Reader]. Budapest: Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem http://www.mke.hu/sites/default/files/szoveggyujtemenyTT_0406_0518.pdf

[4] See Paul O'Neill. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.

[5] Raymond Williams. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976/1983. And Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris Eds. A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Malde, MA, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

[6] Raymond Williams. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976/1983: 19.

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Curatorial Dictionary: Unpacking the Oxymoron An Introduction TOPIC AND BACKGROUND The idea and an articulated need of a curatorial dictionary emerged during a reading seminar in preparation for one of the workshops of tranzit.hu's Free School for Art Theory and Practicein Budapest.

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RIFF: Nicoline van Harskamp "Englishes" 

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RIFF: Nicoline van Harskamp "Englishes" 

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Book launch part of wider artist's project that inquired into "the ways the use of language is entrenched in structures of class and power and which put forward a proposition of an unlikely but desirable world link language." Englishes (2014–2016) explores the widespread use and modification of the English language by its non-native speakers.

See also the artist discussing the project here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-EV6cTkY5s

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Book launch My Name Is Language by Nicoline van Harskamp @ BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht

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See some pages of this unusual book, (1987.) Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary, by Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) a highly influential American analytic logician and philosopher. See Quiddities on google books

"We are accustomed to being told of some word that it is used in several senses, three perhaps. How do they know what to count as one broad sense and what to count as two or three narrower ones? We speak of a cool drink, a cool breeze, and a cool reception; and we are told that ‘cool’ has the same sense in the first two contexts, but a different sense in the third. Again we speak of hard benches, hard liquor, and hard problems, and are told that ‘hard’ has a different sense in each...."

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Tony Bennet writes the following in “The Exhibitionary Complex“ about the emergence of the public museum during the 19th century and how it functions as a site for control as well as a display and production of power:

”In reviewing Foucault on the asylum, the clinic, and the prison as institutional articulations of power and knowledge relations, Douglas Crimp suggests that there 'is another such institution of confinement ripe for analysis in Foucault's terms - the museum - and another discipline - art history'. Crimp is no doubt right, although the terms of his proposal are misleadingly restrictive. For the emergence of the art museum was closely 'related to that of a wider range of institutions - history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national and, later, international exhibitions, arcades and department stores - which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. Furthermore, while these comprised an intersecting set of institutional and disciplinary relations which might be productively analysed as particular articulations of power and knowledge, the suggestion that they should be construed as institutions of confinement is curious. It seems to imply that works of art had previously wandered through the streets of Europe like the Ships of Fools in Foucault's Madness and Civilisation; or that geological and natural history specimens had been displayed before the world, like the condemned on the scaffold, rather than being withheld from public gaze, secreted in the studiolo of princes, or made accessible only to the limited gaze of high society in the cabinets des curieux of the aristocracy. Museums may have enclosed objects within walls, but the nineteenth century saw their doors opened to the general public - witnesses whose presence was just as essential to a display of power as had been that of the people before the spectacle of punishment in the eighteenth century.”

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From the course notes of HDK-Valand's Public Art Course:

"We do not begin with proposing one solid definition of “public” but rather with an unpacking of “public-ness.” Public-ness is not used here to name a generic quality that everything called “public” shares –public art, public health, public safety, public space, public opinion, public policy, member of the general public.

Rather, it is a word used to indicate a “problematic.” Approaching “public” as a “problematic” is not an inquiry about the essence of “public” (‘what is “public” essentially?’, ‘what is the fundamental difference between “the public” and “the private”). Rather, “public-ness” as a “problematic” is building an inquiry into "what are the contexts, usages and genealogies within which the term 'public' does important work?"

In terms of the research dissensus glossary way of working -- thinking through the divergent usages of terms, and the way they are contested -- we might think of this approach as seeing each term as a possible site of a "problematic", or each term as in some way connected/implicated in a wider problematic."

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GUIDE: What does it mean to approach something as a 'problematic'?

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GUIDE: What does it mean to approach something as a 'problematic'?

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Sometimes 'problem' is used simply as a negatively valued term meaning something not working out, and needing a solution. In a similar way the word 'problematic' is often used as an adjective indicating that something is not quite right, it's causing problems, or it's a source of trouble.

In philosophy and in many other disciplines the term 'problematic' is often used as a noun, not as an adjective. 'Problem' and 'problematic' can then be seen as two nouns, seeking to indicate different kinds: (i) 'problem' is typically that which is an obstacle, a not-working-situation, something in need of a solution, something to be worked through. (ii) 'problematic' is then something different from this: it can be the wider set-up that generates the sense of the 'problem', the conditions that enable something to be seen as a 'problem'. A 'problematic' can be understood as something like the framework that enables something to emerge as a 'problem'? By not rushing to answer the question 'What is public?' and instead trying to analyse the conditions under which the question 'What is public?' functions as a problem to be solved, we are approaching public-ness as a problematic.

We might also think of this in terms of the verb 'problematising' ... or making problems. Faced with the question "what is public?" the move is not to say "Public is essentially...." Instead, the move is to consider what needs to be in place for the question ' What is public?' to function as an interesting, meaningful and compelling question.

In the first step of approaching public-ness as a problematic, we are itemising themes that come up again and again, in the situations where the problem 'what is public?' is active.

In philosophy, the term 'problematic' is also used in a more technical way that has a path of development in the work of Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser., Ricoeur... Within this particular genealogy of usage of the term 'problematic'- "it is often considered that the word ‘problématique’ appears for the first time in 1949 in Gaston Bachelard’s Le rationalisme appliqué". If you are interested to explore this philosophical theme further, you might find this book interesting (although it is quite technical) - Thinking the Problematic: Genealogies and Explorations between Philosophy and the Sciences https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/2c996ee0-09ef-42f3-9956-2826027bc532/9783839446409.pdf It is not a part of the course as such, just an indication of where this usage is ultimately derived from - it comes from a way of talking in some 20th century philosophical developments linked to phenomenology, Marxism, and debates in the philosophy of science and in epistemology.

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Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art brings together contributions by artists, theorists, and activists to reflect on radically new publics-forward-looking yet pre-figurative, situated yet nomadic-as they emerge from the experiences of social crisis and political uncertainty that characterize our present. These future publics are provisional assemblies that question existing mechanisms of collective organization and constructions of social value and cultural meaning, recognizing that the institutions of public life cannot continue with a "business-as-usual" attitude as late capital's certitudes collapse and entrenched regimes are being challenged across the globe. Resisting conscription into formal definitions of citizenship, these publics shape new solidarities that cut across conventional lines of class, region, ethnicity, and ideological affiliation. In the field of art, they demonstrate a renewed, insurgent, and self-critical capacity for engagement, rejecting the passive observation of the "viewer," the commodifying gaze of the "consumer," and the stylized participation of the "spectator." Through these accounts, the contributors assemble a vocabulary relevant to artistic practices and civic conclaves mobilized outside the ossified institutions: among propositions such as rebel citizenry, orgnets, cultural users, stateless states, and devolutionary platforms, they articulate and address ways of being and doing beyond those that have been established within the neoliberal paradigm of "the contemporary."

With contributions by: Nancy Adajania (cultural theorist and curator, Bombay); Ariella Azoulay(theorist, curator, and filmmaker, Providence); Amelia Barikin (art historian and writer, Brisbane) and Nikos Papastergiadis (theorist, Melbourne); Bassam el Baroni (curator and writer, Alexandria); Manuel Beltrán (artist, activist, and designer, The Hague); David Graeber (anthropologist, London) and Michelle Kuo (writer and editor, New York); Tom Holert (art historian and critic, Berlin); Brian Holmes (art and cultural critic, Chicago); Geert Lovink (media theorist, Amsterdam); Elżbieta Matynia (sociologist, New York) and Joanna Warsza (researcher, writer, and curator, Berlin and Warsaw); Simon Sheikh (curator and writer, Berlin and London); Jonas Staal (artist, Rotterdam); and Stephen Wright (theorist, writer, and curator, Paris).

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Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art

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Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art brings together contributions by artists, theorists, and activists to reflect on radically new publics-forward-looking yet pre-figurative, situated yet nomadic-as they emerge from the experiences of

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INSTANCE: "Field as Entanglement and Transversal Methodology"

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INSTANCE: "Field as Entanglement and Transversal Methodology"

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This is a read on transversal approach to methodology in relation to fieldwork in  conflict territories. Pelin Tan is a sociologist, art historian, researcher on transversal methodology, alternative pedagogies, and conflict territories, based in Mardin, Turkey. In this conversation she speaks of search for a methodology with which to approach Dara village in Mardin that has been shaped by structural violence.

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Ishita Sharma

This conversation takes place with Pelin Tan, via a google-doc, to better understand some of the ways in which she, along with the Arazi Assembly work with and in the village of Dara. Pelin is a sociologist, art historian, researcher on transversal methodology, alternative pedagogies, and conflict territories, based in Mardin, Turkey (i) . The Arazi Collective is a research platform, composing of urban planners, architects, sociologists and artists, affected by post-disasters conditions such as eviction, replacement and oppression in South East Anatolia (ii) . Their work in Dara village, is just one example that I came across, while on a week-long workshop with the Topological Atlas project on infrastructures, labour, life, non-life and their entanglements.

At the doorway of a house in Dara
We drove to Dara village from the city of Mardin. It was early November and the sun was strong. The village arose out of the surroundings. Stone buildings, some young, and many old, nestled into the landscape of gray-ochre sand and stone. Sparse olive trees spread out across the village. At the entrance to the village, a government hoarding spelt out a history of Dara. It hinted that the village might be a tourist destination. The Syrian border is only a few kilometres away and the army was on high alert. The Turkish army had entered Syria a week before, after the withdrawal of the American forces. An armoured tank peeked out from between the ruins of a necropolis at the entrance to Dara.
Ishita: What struck me most about our trip was the food we had, and Hala's lovely home, made of solid stone and delicate curtains. We shared food, olives, cheese, curd made by her from a giant platter. It is a meal that I will always remember. One of the things that stayed with me was your relationship with her and the easy camaraderie you both shared.... and I was wondering, to start from a more personal moment, if you would tell me a bit about how you situate yourself in Dara and how you found yourself there?

Pelin Tan: I visited Dara village in 2003 and later again in 2006, when I was invited by the Diyarbakir art center to give a talk. However, I focused on the village more and met Hala when I began to live in Mardin from 2013. But I have a strange story which I consider as related to my fate. When I was working as a young academic at the Art & Architecture History and Theory department in the Architecture Faculty of Istanbul Technical University in the beginning of 2000s, Prof. Metin Ahunbay who first excavated the village Dara/Anastasiopolis for almost 30 years was in my department. He asked me to come to Dara to help in the excavation. I didn't understand because I was neither an archaeologist nor an architect; but he thought I knew how to use the computer and speak German, so I could somehow be helpful! Now, Prof. Ahunbay knew Hala and was staying in her house with her students. Hala's house was almost an excavation house - hosting the professor and his architecture students every summer. She had even built Prof. Ahunbay a stone hut on the roof of her house.

When we first met ...I was wandering the village in 2013. She asked me with her half Kurdish and Turkish if I was a teacher and I said yes. I told her I had moved from Istanbul to Mardin to work at the architecture faculty of the new Mardin university. She immediately asked me if I knew Prof. Ahunbay who was a very important "teacher" for her. I said yes, and I told her I was his course assistant for some years. From that moment, Prof. Ahunbay created a bridge between us. If I had accepted his invitation, I would have met Hala in 2002. After 10 years we met by coincidence; or maybe we were waiting to meet since the 2002 so we might know each other well. Hala is a strong, single Kurdish woman, who refused to marry when she was young and has lived alone since then, surrounded by her relatives who live in Izmir (in the west of Turkey). As typical village women, she collects olives, milk from her cows, makes yoghurt, cheese and sends to her relatives in Izmir or sells it in Mardin.

Onions and jars of harvested olives at Hala's house

I: Can you tell us a bit more about the village?

PT: Dara itself is a village with topographical layers of civilizations from the Ancient to the Hellenistic, a Roman border garrison, a Byzantine town, a Christian Suryani village and a current Kurdish village. Spatially, the current housing and productive land sit on these artefacts and are embedded within the ruins. Dara is not only near the Syria- Turkey border, but also historically and topographically is at the border of the geological slope of Northern Mesopotamia. A dry riverbed crosses the village, which held running water until the last century. I have learned its history from articles by my friend Dr. Elif Keser (1).

(1) Elif Keser-Kayaalp &Nihat Erdoğan, "Recent Research on Dara/Anastasiopolis", New Cities in Late Antiquity (late 3rd-7th c. AD), 2017.

Riverbed running through the village

I: One of the other things I wanted to ask you about is on the question of methodologies. Writers of infrastructure have pointed out that new infrastructural systems overlay and trace older patterns, this is quite literally embodied at Dara, where a network of houses exist on and in relation to the ruins of the Roman city from the 6th century. Like with an excavation, you can see the different horizontal layers of living across time, and it continues till the present day. The ruins, the houses in which people live, the network of water systems that are underground, the question of labour here - that show through in the pattern of olive trees that are harvested, embody both multiple different temporalities, as well as systems of knowledge? What does this multiplicity of things mean for your practice? Is the collective and multi-layered form of work you do...also arise from these conditions?

PT: Since 2013, with my research collective Arazi, we have been working on both common and individual interests around the question of how the extractive project of neoliberalism, capitalism and militarism is functioning through spatial infrastructures, how artistic and architectural methodologies bring to the surface different narratives and empirical patchworks. We have several scales of research such as for example, housing, the village, the town, the border, the waterdam, stone companies, military zones, the river, a seed...

A meeting with the Muhtar of Dara in 2015, picture courtesy Pelin

Dara as a spatial entity is more than a village; it is a territory that holds many histories, and where ontologies of humans and non-humans are entangled. From the start, with my students from the architecture master design studio and other spatial workshops, I tried to search for a methodology with which to approach Dara - which cannot be solely understood as a nature-pastoral entity, nor an urban contra village, nor as an archaeological excavation, and neither as a borderline settlement. So, we started with a transversal methodology that crosses the epistemological layers of the more-than-human world.

Mapping of Dara | Legend: Zeytinkl: Olive groves, Su Kaynagi: Water resources, Tarla: Cultivation areas

Every village and town in the Southeast of Anatolia is entangled with other cities and towns as pieces of a constellation. Many reasons such as forced evictions, structural violence, urbanization process, agrarian unproductivity and migration policy continuously shape and form these places, not only the villages and towns themselves but also their relations.

As an archaeological site, the authorities are considering replacing the village (there is even lobbying taking place with UNESCO to line up the site as a preservation area all the way until Midyat) and many villagers who have houses on the archaeological heritage might have to leave in the future. The houses of villagers are layered with many artefacts from the archaeological site and have an eclectic pattern usage. For me this is already preservation.

I: How do you describe Transversal Methodology?

PT: Transversal method for me has meaning as a research practices that aims at actively engaging and thinks through a lens of social justice. I borrow "transversal" from Felix Guattari: "Transversal practice - "neither institutional therapy, nor institutional pedagogy,". As Guattari puts it, but rather an analytic method that cuts across multiple fields-is often affiliated with models of knowledge and pedagogy such as "assemblage methods" or "affective pedagogy". Thinking transversally allows for trans-local, borderless knowledge production that rhizomatically extends beyond the familiar terrains of architecture and design to encompass questions like citizenship, militant pedagogy, institutionalism, borders, war, being a refugee, documents and documenting, urban segregation, the commons, and others.

A map of Dara in Pelin's notebook from 2013

The research in Dara includes several layers of the village. We use spatial mapping, examining visually the layers of the building, oral narrative of the places in Dara, water paths and the networks of agrarian production, their relation to cities, the water infrastructure (the old and contemporary pathways), olive harvesting, the relation of Dara with other towns and villages in the region - Nusaybin, Kiziltepe, Izmir and Mardin, a spatial mapping of how and where women come together. For example, following the everyday reproductive labor of Hala, along with the network and exchange of goods through ethnicity-based kin networks, reveals the other infrastructures of Dara. Most of the villagers from Dara kept their homes, but moved to Izmir, on the west coast of Turkey, where many Kurds have settled to escape violence and eviction between the 1980s-1990s. Still food products such as cheese, flour, bulgur, olives are sent to the relatives in Izmir from Dara.

A Kurdish woman farmer standing in front of a probably Byzantine ruin in her land, photo courtesy Pelin

Directly speaking about methodology, I somehow combine artistic & architectural research and sociological methods in order to analyze various cases from olives to water and border infrastructures and how they are relating together as a patchwork. Maybe a grounding methodology that would be what Anna Tsing is referring to as a "patchy Anthropocene" which we can transform into art, architectural, and spatial research. Patchy/patch means "sites for knowing intersectional inequalities among humans"; so, in the frame of a more-than-human world it is vital in this research to know how a water irrigation system is controlled, powered by whom and how calamities are affecting survival. As Tsing claims: "The Anthropocene may be planetary, but our grip on collaborative survival is always situated-and thus patchy. Throughout history, humanitarian calamities and global inequalities have been enacted through nonhuman agency that reacts to human design. Patchy Anthropocene brings the legacies and tools of social justice-based analysis into Anthropocene studies." And is almost a spatial phenomenology that I follow; as Tsing describes for landscape structures: "A phenomenological attunement to landscape forms as well as to beings-in-landscapes allows multispecies histories to come into view."

Harvesting the olives

I: This is something that you indicated before as well, I was wondering how you understand the boundaries of Dara...It is hard to engage in some of these conversations without falling into dichotomies of the rural and urban, for example. On the Arazi website..it says New Ruralism... is that how you frame the work? I was also thinking about how we usually think in analytic categories... for example, the idea of a village implies a certain unit, which has both an inside and outside...this could be composed of multiple sets of relations or networks... ecological, economic, discursive... how do you work with some of these categories...how would you frame the idea of boundaries while working in Dara?

Mixed constructions, picture courtesy Pelin

PT: I think it is difficult to look at Dara or other places through an urban or village dichotomy. As I described above, this village is linked with different towns through relatives and exchanges. As a concept and a place, the "Rural" is often defined in the frame of a pastoral landscape within a dualistic structure (as opposed to urban). The definition was based on the distinction of the agrarian economy in capitalist development as well on a modernistic definition of culture (it was assumed that the creative energy of culture exists only in urban space). However, the rural area has a cosmography of assembled geological non-human time that is often missed in the discourse.

Furthermore, structural violence and inter-colonial memory are also deeply integrated in the beautiful pastoral landscape. Rural is a territory of layered fragments of geontologies. The effects of war and the active renegotiation of borders demands a transformation in the way infrastructure is approached and worked with, not just at the functional and scalar threshold of architecture, but also as mechanisms that form part of what Elizabeth Povinelli calls geontologies of landscape. According to Povinelli, both "geos" (non-life) and "being" (ontology) are "currently in play in the late liberal governance of difference and markets," in response to which she outlines new figures, tactics and discourses of power by proposing a definition of biopolitics with no separation between elements of Life and Non-life. How then can we approach infrastructural landscapes that have been shaped by structural violence? Within such a framework, villages and landscapes at the borderline in Southeast Turkey are shaped with geontological layers. We see the effect of Ilisu waterdam on the Tigris river along Hasankeyf, where it transforms the whole region into a spatial surveillance network. There are many such examples with new housing projects that justify this necropolitical process by playing with property, class relation and eviction. On the other hand, militarized landscapes keep the state of exception as a permanent condition, while erasing memories of local communities in the region.

Reconstruction image of a village house by Ashraf Nassab (MA, in MAU Architecture, 2019)

Working in Dara, which is in the borderline of Syria; I prefer to use a transversal approach to methodology. How are Dara's rural conditions entangled among the geontologies of the borderline of Southeast Turkey with other towns and non-human elements? How can we emancipate Dara from its linear historical discourse of ruins and archaeological layers? How can we redefine stones, goats, olive trees, water infrastructures, agricultural land, military zones and other "Things" of their fixed meanings and see how they function as entanglement?

During field research, I focus on the spatial environment of how the inhabitants are using and combining elements of historical artefacts. The question is of how this village can sustain without being marked only by its archaeological importance, but rather can be understood and sustained as a cosmology of the rural environment. I refer to Yusoff, as planetary sensibility is necessarily involved in scales between subjective life. The scale relation between the planetary and subjectivity in the site of the commons is, as she writes, "...both invoked and enacted as a commonality across forms of organic and inorganic life." Thus, I try to create a method of how, for example, female labor informs the architectural structure of her housing, how this connects to animals and then layers of landscape in the village, for example the cemetery at the edge of the village, the huge deep 12 meter water cistern, and combined spaces of living of both animal, plants and humans. The scale of the commons is the effective one between the inorganic and organic.

Godernê/Lice 2015, photo by Prof. David Harvey

Bibliography:

Anna Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, "Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology", Current Anthropology Volume 60, Supplement 20, August 2019.

Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies, A Requiem to Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durkheim and London, 2016

Kathryn Yusoff, "Politics of the Anthropocene: Formation of the Commons as a Geologic Process," Antipode Vol. 50 No. 1 2018, pp. 255-276

Zeynep Akinci & Pelin Tan: "Waterdams as Dispossession: Ecology, Security, Colonization", Pelin Tan & Zeynep S.Akıncı, Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary, GSAPP, Lars Muller Publication, Columbia Univ., 2016

Pelin Tan, "Transversal Materialism: On Method, Artifact, and Exception", p.198-219, 2000+: Urgencies in Architectural Theory, Edt.J.Graham, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2015

Pelin Tan, "Surpassing Disaster: Territories, Entanglements, Methods", Pilav, A., Schoonderbeek, M., Sohn, H., Staničić, A., eds. Mediating the Spatiality of Conflicts, International Conference Proceedings, TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (BK Books, 2020).

Pelin Tan & Yildiz Tahtaci (Editors), research book, SEL Publishing, Istanbul, 2020 autumn. forthcoming.

(i) Pelin Tan, sociologist, art historian, researcher on transversal methodology, alternative pedagogies, and conflict territories, based in Mardin, Turkey. 6th recipient of Keith Haring Art&Activism (NY), Senior Researcher of Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (Boston). She is a lead author of 'Towards an Urban Society', the International Panel on Social Progress (Cambridge Publ. 2018). Contributed to: Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Univ., 2017), The Silent University: Toward-Transversal Pedagogy (Sternberg Press, 2016), Urgencies in Architectural Theory (Columbia Univ.Press, 2016), Autonomous Archiving (Istanbul, 2017), The Social (Re)Production of Architecture (Routledge, 2017), "Surpassing Disaster: Territorial conflict, entanglements of things and transversal methods" in Mediating Conflict ( Delft Univ. Architecture, 2020), "Musa Alami Farm as an Experimental Pedagogy in Jericho 1948-1967" (Radical Pedagogies, MIT Press,2020)

(ii) Arazi Assembly (http://araziassembly.org/) is a research platform. My colleagues are urban planners, architects, sociologists and artists. Many members of this collective are affected by post-disasters conditions such as eviction, replacement and oppression. We collaborate with other institutions such as the Chamber of Architects or Misart artist initiative of Mardin. DaraCosmos is a sub-research that uses artistic methodologies. Since 2013, we naturally started to bring our case studies, political engagements and methodologies together in order to have a loose collective sharing, as well as solidarity. In our practice, we are interested in how research and alternative knowledge production are combined with artistic and architectural methodologies grounded in theories of social sciences that may create alternative assemblies of solidarity and resistance. In Arazi Assembly, besides running our urban, architectural and artistic researchers; we are also focusing on the problematics of case studies, related methodologies, the history of state of exception and forms of infrastructural extraction about this region. Political identity oppression, structural violence and extraction of the landscape shape exploitation in this region. We have so far researched Nusaybin as borderline town, Diyarbakir Sur Neighborhood and necropolitics, a post-disaster town Lice that contains earthquake container neighbourhood amongst other projects. Female labor, memory narratives of post-disaster places, mapping non-human elements and the effect of the Anthropocene era lead us to analyze the biopolitics and geontological layers.

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A Conversation with Pelin Tan: Field as entanglement and transversal methodology

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Grav is an easy to use, yet powerful, open source flat-file CMS

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This volume brings together multiple sound artists to considered the plurality of approaches to sound recording as fieldwork. It takes account of the historic trajectory of sound's relations to diverse 'fields'.

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Fieldwork is an integral part of qualitative research. Originating in anthropology and sociology, fieldwork has become a recognised method in health sciences in recent years. Fieldwork involves going into a natural setting to understand people within that context i.e. understanding people in their everyday natural setting. A field worker is comparable to a child who learns by observing and engaging in the activities within their environment.

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RIFF: "A curator’s work is never done alone" 

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RIFF: "A curator’s work is never done alone" 

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From an essay by Carla Acevedo-Yates entitled "A curator’s work is never done alone: curating as a condition, a method & an embedded form of labor", not formally published but available on academia.org.

"The curator as a cultural worker also underwent a paradigm shift under the changing economic conditions of the service economy. Until the first half of the 20th century, the curator was but a module within a larger institutional structure. Curators did not only take care of the physical state of the artworks that constituted a collection, purchased artworks and conducted researched, but also performed a variety of administrative functions in the museum. In this model, the curator labors for the artwork and the collection, usually in the aftermath of its production, making decisions in regards to the selection and display of works, but keeping nonetheless a detached position in the processes of its production. It is only when working industrial conditions began to shift from commodity production to one of intellectual product, alongside the changing role of artists in the production of objects, that the curator started exerting a more active and authorial role. In this model, rather than working for the artist or the art object, the curator works alongside objects in the production of knowledge, frequently imposing overarching themes on art objects, influencing the reception of works, and functioning more like an ideological entrepreneur than an art historian. Under the changing working conditions of immaterial labor production, the worker is encouraged to make decisions and claim a certain type of independence in the organization of work. As a consequence of this capital relation, a new form of labor emerges, that of the independent worker:

A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of “intellectual worker” who is him- or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space. This entrepreneurial spirit comes with a position of power and authority since “the idea of the individual as an entrepreneur of her/himself is the culmination of capital as a machine of subjectivation.”

The implications of this form of labor for curation as an emerging discipline are an increased sense of autonomy in the creative process of developing exhibitions and communicating art histories; the curator is no longer a passive subject under the thumb of the museum or canonical art history, but a producer of what Lazzarato terms as the “ideological product,” which carries and communicates the curator’s subject position. Although the genealogy of the singular or independent curatorial position is quite extensive, it is only during the 1990s that these changes in their working conditions become highly visible. Curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Charles Esche or Jens Hoffmann embody the idea of the self-determining autonomous worker. They are highly mobile individuals that produce projects under a very specific individual signature. However, although they may all claim some level of independent thinking and working, they all have strong institutional ties, at times working under a temporary contractual agreement for a museum or kunsthalle. Their international networks, transnational mobility, and project-based practice endows them with a particular working status, that of the hybrid “employer/employee:” This hybrid figure has been established and managed by intermittent workers to adapt to the new demands of cultural production and at the same time bring their own personal projects to a successful conclusion. The employers/employee elude the traditional codifications of the labour market. They are neither wage-earners, not entrepreneurs, nor freelancers. They combine their different functions without necessarily being confined to any single one of these categories. Not belonging to any one single category in the productive cycle of capital relations, these nomadic workers mobilize their resources and networks inside as well as outside of private and public institutions, exerting a significant amount of influence in the cultural field of production. According to Lazzarato, these new hybrid working conditions are “becoming the norm in the wage-earning system.” The ‘creative class,’ therefore, does not subscribe to the traditional hierarchical categories of the labor market, but rather navigates and negotiates the in-between states of employment/unemployment and wage- earner/freelancer. For curation this working method has a very specific outcome; the difference between freelance and institutional curators has become blurred, complicated and ultimately transgressed."

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By Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney:

” But how can the teacher who is supposed to organise students, or performer who is supposed to organise audiences, or the curator who is supposed to organise viewers, how can this function of organising others not be, immediately, the police? The answer is that the accomplice operates as an organiser, but an organiser without a plot. Through study, through invocation, through care, operative modes of the accomplice, the accomplice insists and persists in conspiracy. These are only some of the operative modes of the accomplice, but they are modes that confront the police and confront being the police directly. These operative modes guide us away from the police on a fugitive path, a path that cannot be plotted. These operations of the accomplice elaborate modes of being with and for others, within and against any plot. And these modes call forth complicit love.”

https://curatorsintensive.tw/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/A-conspiracy-without-a-plot.pdf

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RIFF: Link to Jean-Paul Martinon's book "The Curatorial"

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RIFF: Link to Jean-Paul Martinon's book "The Curatorial"

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https://www.academia.edu/227364/The_Curatorial_A_Philosophy_of_Curating

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Stop curating! And think what curating is all about. This book starts from this simple premise: thinking the activity of curating. To do that, it distinguishes between 'curating' and 'the curatorial'. If 'curating' is a gamut of professional practices for setting up exhibitions, then 'the curatorial' explores what takes place on the stage set up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator. It therefore refers not to the staging of an event, but to the event of knowledge itself. In order to start thinking about curating, this book takes a new approach to the topic. Instead of relying on conventional art historical narratives (for example, identifying the moments when artistic and curatorial practices merged or when the global curator-author was first identified), this book puts forward a multiplicity of perspectives that go from the anecdotal to the theoretical and from the personal to the philosophical. These perspectives allow for a fresh reflection on curating, one in which, suddenly curating becomes an activity that implicates us all (artists, curators, and viewers), not just as passive recipients, but as active members. As such, the Curatorial is a book without compromise: it asks us to think again, fight against sweeping art historical generalizations, the sedimentation of ideas and the draw of the sound bite. Curating will not stop, but at least with this book it can begin to allow itself to be challenged by some of the most complex and ethics-driven thought of our times.

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The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating

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Stop curating! And think what curating is all about. This book starts from this simple premise: thinking the activity of curating. To do that, it distinguishes between 'curating' and 'the curatorial'. If 'curating' is a gamut of professional

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DISSGLOSS: Tranzit's Definition of 'the curatorial'

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DISSGLOSS: Tranzit's Definition of 'the curatorial'

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The curatorial emerges in the early 00s and is propositional in attempting to produce a philosophical ethos in curating. A key contention is that exhibition production is not sui generis to the formation of the curatorial. Key thinkers positioning variances on its philosophy, politics and application, such as Beatrice von Bismarck, Maria Lind, Paul O'Neill and Jean-Paul Martinon.

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CURATORIAL

The emergence of the curatorial as a concept since the 1990s may be considered a part of an attempt to define the field of curatorial-cultural praxis in its broadest sense. In turn, this development may be situated in relation to the concomitant, nevertheless debated, expansion of curating within the cultural field. Curatorial work no longer concerns solely the display of artworks and the task of exhibition-making; it is now also understood as a practice centered on longer-term, less object-orientated, discursive-educational projects that involve various people as instigators and actors (~discursivity ~ collaboration ~participation ~educational turn ~performativity). Subsequently, curatorial work-which may also be read as a reaction to authorial and consolidated forms of exhibition production-has become more conceptual, increasingly concerned with process- knowledge- and research-based endeavors. Likewise, expanded curatorial work enters into social and political discourses, inasmuch as many projects-with their thematics, research or statement-wish to contribute to socio-political realities, to understand or even change parts of the world around us (~ collaboration ~participation).

The concept of the curatorial can also be linked to those inquiries, which attempt to make a distinction between the manifestation of an act in practice, and its broader yet more elusive conceptual framework. The differentiation of politics vs. the political by Chantal Mouffe [1] or that of critique/criticism vs. criticality by Irit Rogoff [2] are cases in point. The newly coined (latter) concepts of these distinctions are frequently put forth as a desired direction to follow. In terms of curatorial practice, this distinction is made between curating (under which mostly exhibition-making is understood) and the curatorial; nevertheless, with the latter concept, the emphasis is on the relation of curating and the curatorial, not their difference.

The conceptualizations of the curatorial in the contemporary art field are manifold; proponents of this notion have varied interpretations as to its meaning, significance, and modus operandi. Among others, it has been understood as something more than curating, as a form of critical thought that may be deferred in its manifestation; [3] an expanded function of mediation that aims to question and critique the status quo; [4] or a dynamic constellation of activities with ways of co-productively and dialogically working with others, which, at the same time, is able to disrupt consolidated forms of practice. [5] However, as a common denominator, the curatorial may be best understood broadly, as a way of working within the cultural field. Correlatively, this notion can be viewed to attempt to posit curatorial work as a discipline as well as a socio-cultural practice for generating, contextualizing and making art and ideas public. One is reminded here of Annie Fletcher's remark in relation to Paraeducation Department, in a 2005-interview, which can be regarded to delineate the notion of the curatorial:

"The mechanism of an exhibition is simply not enough to describe what goes on in art, or what goes on at the practice level. What we used to articulate in terms of particular artists oeuvres, or curatorial oeuvres I suppose, should be democratised. That is what Paraeducation was about. I hope that everybody grasps the method - it's not an artwork, but just a method of working." [6]

The curatorial as a methodology, however, cannot be ascribed to a specific set of practices or projects; its outcome can be a discussion, an exhibition, a space, a book, an action, a combination of all these or other, often intermediary forms. Yet, one of the salient features of the curatorial, in terms of the people involved, may be its collaborative and collective character (~ collaboration ~participation discursivity ~educational turn) Working together curatorially could mean several individuals coming together, sharing responsibility for a project to realize, a trust in one another's work within that, as well as potentially realizing a (plat)form that involves (many) others in a formative way. Consequently, these kinds of projects tend to be polymorphous; they are longer-term, complex, and often research-based, with many levels and instances of realization, in a stage of perpetual becoming, This reminds us, in relation to this ever-becoming position, of Irit Rogoff's Derridaesque positioning of the curatorial within the gap (or différance) between a project's proposition and its inability to carry out that very proposition. [7] Although locating the workings of the curatorial in the negative hypothetical might be a bridge too far, the "impossibility" of curatorial work is a familiar situation to many, as it is often the case that there is a gap between the intention of an exhibition or project and its (physical/concrete) realization. [8]

It is also important to note that the concept of the curatorial is not embraced by the whole curatorial-contemporary art field as such. The dividing line between the opponents and proponents seem to be a hierarchized and oppositional understating between exhibitions-making and discursive practices, as well as between artists and curators (~ discursivity). Jens Hoffmann is one of the most outspoken critics curatorial practices that do not concern exhibition-making. With coining the term paracuratorial, which could be regarded as a (close) synonym for the curatorial, Hoffmann criticizes curatorial practices that go beyond exhibition making. [9] The para is derived from Gérard Genette's paratext which are all the elements beyond the body text of a book (blurb, back matter, typography, etc.). Hence, the paracuratorial, in Hoffmann's sense, is all the activities which are either outside of exhibition making (such as lectures, screenings), yet posited as the outcome of curatorial work (~discursivity ~educational turn), or which are, as he states, "exhibitions without art, working with artists on projects without ever producing anything that could be exhibited" [10] (~ performativity).

Beyond the debate about the centrality of the exhibition form, another criticism leveled against the curatorial is that it prioritizes the figure of the curator. For instance, in an essay referencing the concept of the curatorial, Anton Vidokle understands the figure of the curator to be dominant over that of the artist in terms of the originator of art; hence, he finds the concept of the curatorial useful only to re-inscribe the power position of the curator (~ authorship ~ collaboration). The name itself is quite unfortunate, as it does seem to focus on the curator. Yet, the concept endeavors rather to denote a particular way of working, involving many participants and different levels of collaboration. In this way, the curatorial has the potential to become an encompassing idea within the contemporary art and cultural field.

Eszter Szakács

References and Further Readings

Bismarck, Beatrice von - Schafaff, Jörn - Weski, Thomas eds.
2012 Cultures of the Curatorial, Berlin, Sternberg Press

Fletcher, Annie
2005 On Curatorial Hypothesis. Interviewed by Andrea Wiarda. A Priori 2005/12; aprior.org. A Priori. Web. 2012. szept. 4. Eredeti, de nem aktív link, cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20090106005312/http://users.coditel.net/aprior.org/wiarda.html

Hoffmann, Jens - Lind, Maria
2011 To Show or Not To Show. Mousse 2011/31; moussemagazine.it Mousse Magazine, Web. 2012. szept. 4. http://www.moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=759

Lind, Maria
2009 The Curatorial. Artforum 2009:103

Lind, Maria. Ed.
2012 Performing the Curatorial-Within and Beyond Art. Berlin, Sternberg Press

Mouffe, Chantal
2005 On the Political. London, New York, Routledge

Müller, Vanessa Joan
2011 Relays. The Exhibitionist 4/2011, 66-70

O'Neill, Paul.
2007 The Curatorial Turn: From Practice. In Judith Rugg, Michèle Sedgwick eds. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Bristol, Intellect Books, 13-28

O'Neill, Paul - Wilson, Mick. eds.
2010 Curating and the Educational Turn. London, Amsterdam, Open Editions-de Appel

O'Neill, Paul
2012 The Curatorial Constellation and the Paracuratorial Paradox. The Exhibitionist 6/2012, 55-60

Páldi Lívia
2011 Notes on the Paracuratorial. The Exhibitionist 4/2011, 71-76

Pethick, Emily
2011 The Dog That Barked at the Elephan in the Room. The Exhibitionist 4/2011, 77-82

Rogoff, Irit
2003 From Criticism to Critique to Criticality. eipcp.net.. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2003. jan. Web, 2012. nov 2. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en

Rogoff, Irit
2006 Smuggling-An Embodied Crticality. eipcp.net. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2006. Web. 2012. nov. 2. http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling

Rogoff, Irit - Bismarck, Beatrice von
2012 Curating/Curatorial. In Bismarck, Beatrice von - Schafaff,, Jörn - Weski, Thomas eds. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin, Sternberg Press, 21-38

Vidokle, Anton
2010 Art Without Artists? e-flux Journal. 16 (2010). e-flux.com, e-flux, Web. 2012. szeptember 4. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-artists/

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CURATORIAL The emergence of the curatorial as a concept since the 1990s may be considered a part of an attempt to define the field of curatorial-cultural praxis in its broadest sense. In turn, this development may be situated in relation to the concomitant, nevertheless debated, expansion of curating within the cultural field.

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Curating is etymologically rooted in the Latin word cura meaning care.

Conventionally, the curator was understood as a custodian (often trained initially as an art historian) who took care of artworks, artefacts, documents, records etc. in various types of collections including archives, private collections, museums etc. In recent decades curating has become a domain of study with a proliferation of courses, largely at the Masters' level but also recently at the Bachelor's level. We increasingly also encounter it as a research method.

We are witness to or engaged by significant shifts in how curating is now being conceptualised, practised and theorised. The literature has expanded rapidly, reactively to new considerations in artistic practice including volumes on media-specific forms of curating including curating music practices, curating live art and performance, curating 'new media', curating public art etc. We also see developments in the field that raise questions such as whether curating can be queered; and what Black and feminist curating may be. The debates on these often resist singular definitions or forms.

This work runs in tandem with the development of Exhibition Histories. Exhibition histories is an endeavour that seeks to revisit and profile examples of models of exhibitions that have been 'game-changers' whether through developing new formats and directions of curating, including how curating and artistic practices operate in a nexus between each other - as a space of mediation that also addresses the formation of differing modes of audienceship.

Proactively, new concepts and theories are also being put forward, of which 'the curatorial' is one.

We also now see the term applied to various other non-art activities, from arranging shelves at home to the positioning of cushions to food presentations and table-scaping.

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Hosting: a material practice that is linked to events in which humans are invited to participate. Hosting as a material practice relates to the conditions of production in the field of socially engaged, aimed at creating a community. Hosting operates in hybrid contexts between the physical and online. Its relevance for social, technological, and cultural interactions is the reimagination of how "I" may relate to "we" and vice versa. Glossary, page 40, Eleni Kamma, hosting

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The world today faces overwhelming ecological and social problems and the concern for material existence on earth is more pressing than ever. Making Matters spells out various roles that visual artists and designers play facing these issues. Collective action is necessary and inevitable.
Collective action often changes the artist's identity and working habits: from individuality and autonomy to collectivity and collaboration, both locally and globally. These developments have given rise to new kinds of collective art and design practices: artists work together with non-artists, make products for their local environment and take on multiple identities, such as researcher, community activist, computer hacker or business consultant.
Making Matters looks at art practices across all continents that do not conform to a Western concept of art nor to traditional distinctions between art, design, research and activism-where the boundaries between art, design, research and activism become blurred or are dissolved.
The entries in this vocabulary experiment with concepts and keywords of current art practices that may no longer be recognizable as art.
Contributors: Aliens in Green, a.pass / Lilia Mestre, Florian Cramer, Display Distribute / Elaine W. Ho, Feral Atlas / Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou Anja Groten, Thalia Hoffman, Jatiwangi art Factory / Bunga Siagian & Ismal Muntaha, Eleni Kamma, Frans-Willem Korsten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Dani Ploeger, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting, Olu Taiwo, Janneke Wesseling, West / Baruch Gottlieb, West / Akiem Helmling, Z. Blace Partners: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University; Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; Waag, Amsterdam; West Den Haag; Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam Support: Dutch Research Council (NWO), part of the project 'Bridging art, design and technology through Critical Making' (project number 314-99-203), research programme Smart Culture Design: Hackers & Designers

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Making Matters - A Vocabulary for Collective Arts - slanted

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The world today faces overwhelming ecological and social problems and the concern for material existence on earth is more pressing than ever. Making Mat

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INSTANCE: Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism

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INSTANCE: Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism

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This journal traces new paradigms in artistic practice that are often segued with the political. Whilst the journal emanates from the University of California, under the editorship of art historian Grant Kester, it takes account of developments within socially-engaged practice across different geo-political contexts. Ultimately, it recognises socially-engages practice as being in development and with differing nuances and prioritisations.

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FIELD | A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism

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Published by Routledge in the Research in Art and Politics Series, 2019. 

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INSTANCE: Book on Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China

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INSTANCE: Book on Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China

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This is the first edited volume that, through case studies, attempts to identify and contour the complexities and divergences of socially-engaged art in mainland China. It also challenges assumptions of how criticism of the state may be censored in China by revealing multiple 'soft' strategies designed by artists, curators and critics to interrogate contemporary realities across the diverse regions of mainland China. It determines how socially-engaged practices respond to the top down, profit-centric and urban-centric dynamics of contemporary mainland China.

Here is a video link to the book's author Meiqin Wang discussing the publication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDgqoVpySaE

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INSTANCE: Resistance "Sick Woman Theory"

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INSTANCE: Resistance "Sick Woman Theory"

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Johanna Hedva's sick woman theory is an interesting argument to who and when you can be political, they argue about the politics of a sick person stuck in bed and the importance of seeing their resistance while not able to be in the able normative and patriarchal space of the public sphere.

“If being present in the public is what is required to be political, the whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the streets”

Some more Hedva here: https://topicalcream.org/features/why-its-taking-so-long/

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This 2020 volume by Anna Watkins Fisher interrogates a 'sub-species' of resistance termed parasitism. It seeks to take account of how previous forms of resistance, such as withdrawal or refusal, are complexified within the jaws of neoliberalisation and suggests that other strategies are now in play. In some ways it builds on previous work by BAVO etc. on over-identification.

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Duke University Press - The Play in the System

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“Anna Watkins Fisher’s figure of the parasite offers us insight into the contemporary condition in which, due to ubiquitous appropriation and financialization, every oppositional gesture seems to have already been co-opted in advance. Her explorations illuminate the space in which artists and others are forced to operate today and outline ways in which it may still be possible, albeit quite ambiguously, to maneuver, resist, and express opposition.” — Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

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Narratives of Native Presence

Edited by Gerald Vizenor

The concept and idea of survivance has revolutionized our understanding of the lives, creative impulses, literary practices, and histories of the Native peoples of North America. Engendered and articulated by the Anishinaabe critic and writer Gerald Vizenor, survivance throws into relief the dynamic, inventive, and enduring heart of Native cultures well beyond the colonialist trappings of absence, tragedy, and powerlessness. Vizenor argues that many people in the world are enamored with and obsessed by the concocted images of the Indian—the simulations of indigenous character and cultures as essential victims. Native survivance, on the other hand, is an active sense of presence over historical absence, deracination, and oblivion.

The nature of survivance is unmistakable in Native stories, natural reason, active traditions, customs, and narrative resistance and is clearly observable in personal attributes such as humor, spirit, cast of mind, and moral courage in literature. In this anthology, eighteen scholars discuss the themes and practices of survivance in literature, examining the legacy of Vizenor’s original insights and exploring the manifestations of survivance in a variety of contexts.

Resistance

https://www.versobooks.com/products/600-our-history-is-the-future

Our History Is the Future:

Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

by Nick Estes

In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.

In Our History is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the #NoDAPL movement from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. While a historian by trade, Estes also draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires), making Our History is the Future at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto.

Further perspective:

Alcohol After the Apocalypse /

Angelika Joseph

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/sick-architecture/465002/alcohol-after-the-apocalypse/

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1. Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice

Gerald Vizenor

2. Why It's a Good Thing Gerald Vizenor Is Not an Indian

Karl Kroeber

3. Native Survivance in the Americas: Resistance and Remembrance in Narratives by Asturias, Tapahonso, and Vizenor

Helmbrecht Breinig

4. On Subjectivity and Survivance: Rereading Trauma through The Heirs of Columbus and The Crown of Columbus

Deborah L. Madsen

5. Playing Indian: Manifest Manners, Simulation, and Pastiche

Ying-wen Yu

6. William Apess: Storier of Survivance

Arnold Krupat

7. As Long as the Hair Shall Grow: Survivance in Eric Gansworth's Reservation Fictions

Susan Bernardin

8. The War Cry of the Trickster: The Concept of Survivance in Gerald Vizenor's Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point

Alan Velie

9. Shifting the Ground: Theories of Survivance in From Sand Creek and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57

Linda Lizut Helstern

10. Total Apocalypse, Total Survivance: Nuclear Literature and/or Literary Nucleus--Melville, Salinger, Vizenor

Takayuki Tatsumi

11. Facing the Wiindigoo: Gerald Vizenor and Primo Levi

Joe Lockard

12. Tactical Mobility as Survivance: Bone Game and Dark River by Louis Owens

John Gamber

13. Ghosts in the Gaps: Diane Glancy's Paradoxes of Survivance

James Mackay

14. The Naked Spot: A Journey toward Survivance

Diane Glancy

15. Survivance in the Works of Velma Wallis

James Ruppert

16. Writing Survivance: A Conversation with Joseph Boyden

Allan J. Ryan

17. A Lantern to See By: Survivance and a Journey into the Dark Heart of Oklahoma

Jace Weaver

18. Survivance Memories: The Poetry of Carter Revard

A. Robert Lee

Contributors

Index

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1. Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice Gerald Vizenor 2. Why It's a Good Thing Gerald Vizenor Is Not an Indian Karl Kroeber 3. Native Survivance in the Americas: Resistance and Remembrance in Narratives by Asturias, Tapahonso, and Vizenor Helmbrecht Breinig 4.

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INSTANCE: Book on "Articulating Resistance:  Art and Activism"

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INSTANCE: Book on "Articulating Resistance:  Art and Activism"

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INSTANCE: The exhibition "Interpol– a global network from Stockholm and Moscow"

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INSTANCE: The exhibition "Interpol– a global network from Stockholm and Moscow"

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Zabel mentions the exhibition Interpol– a global network from Stockholm and Moscow— which took places at the Färgfabriken in Stockholm, in 1996, which ended up being describes as “Stockholm Scandal”. One of the participating artists, Oleg Kulik was arrested by the Swedish police. This performance and the exhibition as a whole aroused a scandalous response from the media. Interpol was called “an event that divided the art world into East and West”.

“The Stockholm project was (explicitly) about the East-West dialogue and (implicitly) about the dominant position in this dialogue. The Open Letter to the Art World, denouncing Kulik, Brener, and Viktor Misiano as being against art, democracy, and women (can a “politically correct” mind produce more terrible accusations?) because they did not take the proposed terms of the “dialogue” for granted, as “natural,” was just a symptomatic “slip.” Very quickly, both Brener and Kulik were recodified and the role and meaning of their actions was determined. The art world found their place inside its normal discourse—precisely as representatives of “the other,” in their case, of the wild, destructive, dangerous, naively critical, but also strangely attractive “Russian essence.” Now they are supposed to behave aggressively, to break windows, etc.

Viktor Misiano, one of the co-curators of the show writes:

“The first meeting was thus fraught with frustration and resulted in prejudices being formed. Exchanging impressions, the Russians decided that the Swedes suffered from bohemian insipidness, intellectual inertia and an inability to apply themselves to conceptual thinking. The Swedes, in turn, regarded the Russians as complex-laden and constrained, having a totalitarian way of thinking, and being aggressive. Taking me to the airport, Jan Aman admitted that the encounter allowed some margin of error, and pointed out that the main objective now was to repair the damage during the second meeting”

“…. However, it soon became apparent that the West would only recognize Russia as a great power on one condition: that she would not behave as such. So Kulik was chained up at the Fargfabriken on condition that he did not bite. When he did bite, he was accused of "imperialism and directly attacking democracy". Western political correctness presupposes that the Other may receive an equal status and count on dialogue only when it shows itself to be humble, weak, ill-starred. If it departs from the victim's role, it is immediately seen as a fundamentalist and imperialist.”

https://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/41/article/799

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Fargfabriken, Stockholm, 2 March 1996

It was suggested that Kulik produce his Doghouse project within Interpol, an exhibition devoted to the problem of communication. The artist was invited as a sort of a ready-made to stay in a purpose-built house. The audience was warned that any communication with the artist who denounced the language of culture is dangerous and that no one should cross the borders of his territory. Following the logic of this action Kulik bit a certain Mr. Lindquist, who had ignored the warning. Kulik was arrested by the Swedish police. This performance and the exhibition as a whole aroused a scandalous response from the media. Interpol was called "an event that divided the art world into East and West". Kulik published an explanation of his action in response to demands made by the Manifesta I curators.
Here is an excerpt of that letter, written on 15 March 1996:
Why Have I Bitten a Man?

An open letter of Oleg Kulik

/.../

I am distressed that an absolute clearness of my performance Dog House (within the borders of Interpol) hasn't saved it from being wrongly interpreted. Why did I stand on all fours? Why did I become a dog?

My standing on hands and knees is a conscious falling outside the human horizon, connected with a feeling of the end of anthropocentrism, with a crisis of not just contemporary art but contemporary culture on the whole. I feel its over-saturation of semiosis as my own tragedy, it's excessively refined cultural language that results in misunderstanding, estrangement, and people's mutual irritation.

I thought that in Russia one could feel these processes as nowhere else. I thought that we were Different, and the cause was inside us, in eternal ambitions of cultural superpower status in a situation of insolvent actual cultural events. In Moscow I became a dog, I growled there and demonstrated a dog's devotion to an artist's ambitions. I was not going to export an artist's experience without a language outside the Muscovite context. But while getting to know the Western context I found out that my program is applicable there as well.

Art as an addition to a supermarket seems an impasse to me.

For me, "human" stopped being associated with the notions "alive", "feeling" and "understanding" and started to be associated with the notions "artificial" and "dangerous". I began to look for some basis outside the human. But over-human for me represents our bestial nature, which doesn't need any explanation from the outside.

/.../

____________________

Oleg Kulik was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1961. He graduated from the Kiev Art School in 1979 and the Kiev Geological Survey College in 1982. Between 1990 and 1993 he served as the Art Director of the Regina Gallery in Moscow. He received the Berlin Senate grant (1995/1996) and the order of Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France. He lives and works in Moscow. He has exhibited widely, among others at: Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism. Saatchi Gallery, London, 2016; Frames, Regina Gallery, Moscow, 2013; Deep into Russia, Regina Gallery, London, 2012; Deep into Russia, Galleria Pack, Milan, 2010; New Sermon. Photos and Videos of Performances 1993-2003, Rabouan Moussion Gallery, Paris, 2008; OLEGKULIK. Chronicle. 1987-2007. Retrospective Exhibition, Central House of Artist, Moscow, 2007; Russia!, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2006; Berlin-Moscow, Historical Museum, Moscow, 2004; Live Culture, Tate Modern, London, 2003; Deep into Russia, S.M.A.K., Gent, 2001, I Bite America and America Bites Me (together with Mila Bredikhina), Deitch Projects, New York, 1997; Manifesta I (together with Mila Bredikhina), V-2, Rotterdam; and Interpol, Fargfabriken, Stockholm, 1996. His work is also regularly featured in major biennials of contemporary art: Moscow (2, 3, 4), Venice (47, 49, 50, 51), Valencia (1 and 2), São Paulo (24), and the 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2012.

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Fargfabriken, Stockholm, 2 March 1996 It was suggested that Kulik produce his Doghouse project within Interpol, an exhibition devoted to the problem of communication. The artist was invited as a sort of a ready-made to stay in a purpose-built house.

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In this essay Igor Zabel writes discusses the game of representations, the position of being the “Other’s Other”.

“The Russian artist perpetually finds him/herself between the Scylla and Charybdis of two representational mechanisms which are switched on automatically and ruthlessly. In Russia [ … ] being a ‘contemporary artist’ means represent Western culture [ … ] In the West, on the other hand, a Russian artist must inevitably represent Russia.”

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INSTANCE: Michel Callon "Performative Economics"

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INSTANCE: Michel Callon "Performative Economics"

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While Austin showed how specific speech acts might generate the effects they describe, another foundational perspective of performativity was found in the work of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) sociologists inspired by Actor-Network Theory. These authors took Austin’s theory

and applied it to scientific statements that are actively engaged in the constitution of the reality that they describe. In particular, the sociologist Michel Callon emphasized the processes of performativity through which economic theories transform market activities and the

organization of markets themselves through agency (Aggeri, 2017; Callon, 2007). In this perspective,

it was put in emphasis the performative role of scientific statements, theories and models in broadly defining, performing, shaping and formatting the economy rather than observing how it functions.

With this thesis, Callon challenges sociologists to rethink their economic discourse, studying the performative effects of economics and how economic models are key ingredients of economic activities.

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DISSGLOSS: Performance and performativity from a management perspective

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DISSGLOSS: Performance and performativity from a management perspective

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Even when considering the management field uniquely, performance is a pluralistic concept, migrating from one linguistic and semantic register to another. For example, At the centre of strategy research, it is treated in this academic field as an aggregate firm-level outcome or a dependent variable which can be operationalized in various ways, ranging from financial and market-based indicators to dimensions of social performance (Guérard et. al., 2013).

Still, in the management field, performance is about effectiveness, namely,

the better and more specific function or operation for the optimal usage of input to create tangible value. As management is embedded in the modern progress and productivity paradigms, efficiency

is strictly connected with measurability, underlying the assumption that it is worth what is verifiable.

Consequential, individual, and organizational performance has been increasingly formalized and made auditable. Also from a Human Resource Management (HRM) point of view, employees have performance considering the measurable value they bring to the organization which hired them.

The expression of human resources itself. recalls the idea of efficiency and productivity: individuals are more and more ranked in terms of economic performance (as sales or the number of achieved

contracts), and they are resources because of their contribution to the overall performance system

(Raviola & Zackariasson, 2018).

However, the word “performance” in the management field is ambiguous because it refers to the process (the accomplishment or realization of an action in its dynamic course) and its results.

Referring to both the capacity to act and the action’s efficiency of effectiveness, the word

“performance” helps us to remember its occult relationship with the performative body.

To grasp this connection, it is helpful to consider how this word is central in the sports world, where time, distance, weight, and height numbers facilitate the comparison and classification between bodies.

As it happens in the sports field, in the past, the predominant goal of Scientific Management scholars was to increase efficiency thanks to better body usage, organization, and coordination, exploiting some learned and repeated (and then embodied) movements.

Physical performance was strictly

connected with production, even though nowadays we have lost interest in the body when we talk about effectiveness.

Main references:

Gond, Jean-Pascal, Laure Cabantous, Nancy Harding, and Mark Learmonth. "What Do We Mean by Performativity in Organizational and Management Theory? The Uses and Abuses of Performativity." International Journal of Management Reviews : IJMR 18, no. 4 (2016): 440-63.

Guérard, Stéphane, Ann Langley, and David Seidl. "Rethinking the Concept of Performance in Strategy Research: Towards a Performativity Perspective." Management (Paris, France : 1998) 16, no. 5 (2013): 566-78.

Raviola Elena, and Zackariasson Peter. Arts and Business Building a Common Ground for Understanding Society. London New York: Routledge, 2018.

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INSTANCE: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy 

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INSTANCE: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy 

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Empty Stages, Crowded Flats investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how ‘theatre-like’ strategies and techniques can in fact enable ‘reality making’ situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed.

The publication cited above departs from J. L. Austin's definition of 'the performative' in his book How to Do Things with Words (1955). In the book, Austin lays out three principal definitions of Speech Acts. This article provides some overview: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://sites.units.it/eserfilo/art106/oishi106.pdf

Austin's theory is that the performative can be applied to how we understand sentences that are also actions, not just verbs. Judith Butler, John Searles and Jacques Derrida have also built upon Austin's thinking.

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Linear / non-linear are terms that derive from the word line. Like most ancient words, line is one of those terms that collected meanings over the centuries.

Line can describe a geometrical figure with no width that infinitely stretches from a beginning to an end. At the same time it describes a material length, for example a piece of rope. It can describe a sentence or part of it in a printed text. These are some of the examples, and many more can be found in any dictionary of your choice.

Similarly linear and non-linear are terms that inherit a great variety of meanings. They can be described in accordance with the specific definition of line that they are drawing from.

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GLOSS: Dynamics and the difference between linear and nonlinear dynamical systems

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GLOSS: Dynamics and the difference between linear and nonlinear dynamical systems

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Dynamics is the subject that deals with change, with systems that evolve in time. Whether the system in question settles down to equilibrium, keeps repeating in cycles, or does something more complicated, it is dynamics that we use to analyze the behavior.

The essential difference between linear and nonlinear dynamical systems is that linear systems can be broken down into parts.Then each part can be solved separately and finally recombined to get the answer.This idea allows a fantastic simplification of complex problems, and underlies such methods as normal modes, Laplace transforms, superposition arguments,and Fourier analysis. In this sense, a linear system is precisely equal to the sum of its parts.

But many things in nature don’t act this way. Whenever parts of a system interfere, or cooperate, or compete, there are nonlinear interactions going on. Most of everyday life is nonlinear, and the principle of superposition fails spectacularly.

Examples of non-linear dynamical systems are biological oscillators such as neurons and heart cells,

earthquakes, the economy, turbulent fluids, general relativity, neural networks and chaos.

(Borrowed from the introductory paragraphs in the text above, which is a standard text in the field. For a more strict definition of linear/ nonlinear mathematical equations cannot be avoided).

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The term “discipline” etymologically links to the Latin term disciplina which means “the instruction given to a disciple” (http://www.etymonline.com/). The Oxford English Dictionary places the origin of the word in the Middle Ages. However, the historic origin of disciplines as a structuring mode for academic practice is placed differently depending on the geographical location and what feature of disciplines are being highlighted. While Struppa (2002) argues that the term has been around “since the very inception of western thought”, Aram (2004, p. 380) and Turner (2006, p. 183) mention that the word has been in use since the Middle Ages, when universities first made their appearance in the western world in Paris and Bologna (Hearn 2003, p. 3). In the context of America, Chandler (2004, p. 358) links “discipline” to the period 1870-1900, which is when most universities in the US were established. Michel Foucault talks about an emergence in the 1970s of what he calls the “specific individual” who speaks from a particular disciplinary location (within the university), distinguished from the “universal individual” who “speaks as the conscience and consciousness of society” (Chandler 2004, p. 357, following Foucault 1980, pp. 126-27). Hearn (2003, p. 6) argues that disciplinary structures in the UK became entrenched in the mid-nineteenth century when the universities were subjected to major reforms that were conditioned by external cultural, economic and political factors. Boisot (1972, p. 89) argues that the formation of disciplines has its origin in two tendencies. The first of these, he argues, arises from man’s natural tendency to separate, classify and conceptualise the surroundings. The second arises from the need of science to take full advantage of accumulated knowledge. Aram, (2004, p. 380) following Lattuca (2001), comments that the advancement of disciplinary education in the US followed not only a commitment to science, but was also a result of the belief that citizens had to be educated in specialised fields in order to participate in the economic life of the country. Turner (2000, p. 48) makes the point that not all successful organisations of knowledge actually became a discipline.

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Roberta Frank (1988, cited in Klein, 1996, p. 8) places the origin of the term interdisciplinarity within the Social Science Research Council, when the term was used as a kind of ‘bureaucratic shorthand’ for research involving two or more professional societies.

Interdisciplinarity has since been promoted by several movements. One of these is the Unity of Science movement which campaigned in the 1930s and 1940s in the West. The search for “grand and simplifying concepts” such as the second law of thermodynamics, mass-energy equivalence, quantum mechanics and general systems theory have also promoted interdisciplinarity (Klein 2000, p. 5).

The concept gained momentum in the US with the student unrests in the late 1960s. One of the demands during this unrest was for disciplinary structures in universities to be removed and replaced by more holistic concepts that were closer to practical life. Later the concept of interdisciplinarity came to denote reform, innovation and progress (Weingart and Stehr, 2000, p. xii). In 1972, following extensive cross-national research, the OECD published the seminal volume Interdisciplinarity, which sought to promote interdisciplinarity in teaching and university organisational structures. Several studies and conferences followed.

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A different (and less metaphorical) usage of the terms ecology/ecological can be found in the article "Ecological Sound Art: Steps towards a new field" by Gilmurray (2017).

Rather than using ecological theories to describe complex relationships in the realm of music performance, Gilmurray focuses on ways in which ecological sound art might help audiences to engage with contemporary environmental issues: through "sensing the mesh of vibrant matter", "sensing ecological relationships through sound" and presenting "sonic possible worlds". (p. 37-39)

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This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref.

Truax, Barry 2019. Sound, Media, Ecology. p. 21.

Barclay, Leah 2019. Sound, Media, Ecology. p. 153.

Gallagher, Michael 2019. Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts. p. 277.

Barclay, Leah Gifford, Toby and Linke, Simon 2020. Interdisciplinary approaches to freshwater ecoacoustics. Freshwater Science, Vol. 39, Issue. 2, p. 356.

Seabrook, Deborah 2020. Music therapy in the era of climate crisis: Evolving to meet current needs. The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 68, Issue. , p. 101646.

Scriven, Richard 2020. Fluvial Tones: An Audio Exploration of a Shifting Riverscape. Anthropocenes - Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, Vol. 1, Issue. 1,

Marković, Sanja and Petrović, Jelena 2021. Raising environmental awareness through art projects. Reciklaza i odrzivi razvoj, Vol. 14, Issue. 1, p. 11.

Browning, Joseph 2021. Sound and More-than-Human Sociality in Catherine Clover'sOh! Ah ah pree trra trra. Organised Sound, Vol. 26, Issue. 2, p. 179.

L. Oliver, Jessica Turkay, Selen Brereton, Margot M. Watson, David and Roe, Paul 2021. Engaging with Nature Sounds & Citizen Science by Designing for Creative & Contextual Audio Encounters. p. 1.

Dobson, Joanna and Schauerman, Julia 2021. Transcending Boundaries: The Acousmatic Story in the Anthropocene. Cadernos de arte e antropologia, p. 7.

Truax, Barry 2021. Acoustic sustainability in urban design: lessons from the World Soundscape Project. Cities & Health, Vol. 5, Issue. 1-2, p. 122.

Zakharova, Tatiana and Agarwal, Malvika 2022. Digital collaboratory. Children's Geographies, p. 1.

Linke, Simon Desjonqueres, Camille Gifford, Toby and Barclay, Leah 2022. Encyclopedia of Inland Waters. p. 657.

Barclay, Leah 2022. Sounding Extremes: Ecological Sound Art in the Anthropocene. Circuit, Vol. 32, Issue. 2, p. 37.

Kanngieser, A. M. 2023. Sonic colonialities: Listening, dispossession, and the (re)making of Anglo‐European nature. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 48, Issue. 4, p. 690.

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Ecological Sound Art: Steps towards a new field | Organised Sound | Cambridge Core

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Ecological Sound Art: Steps towards a new field - Volume 22 Issue 1

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Ecology is sometimes used as a metaphor in research for describing complex systems and interdependencies within these systems.

One example can be found in Per Anders Nilsson’s dissertation” A field of possibilities : designing and playing digital musical instruments” from 2011, where he emphasizes the actants and their role in the environment:

”I assume that an ecological approach is applicable in music improvisation, given that interaction with the environment goes on continuously, and with all the senses. In this setting, I regard the instruments, playing constraints, fellow musicians, spaces, audience, and other factors as active agents in the environment. A key concept is the theory of affordances, and in a theory of ecological listening. ” (p. 121)

https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/handle/2077/27953/gupea_2077_27953_21.pdf?sequence=21

A related example can be found in Marcel Cobussen’s The Field of Improvisation from 2017 (https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/52784 ), where where he draws upon anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s ecological system theory to describe the importance of environmental influences on musical improvisation. One of the things that Cobussen emphasizes about Bateson’s theory is its non-anthropocism, that ”man – dissolved into eyes, brain, and muscles – is but one actant in the entire network and is not considered the initiator or, in Bateson’s words, the ’governor’.  (p.58)

In fact, Cobussen refers to his whole theoretical approach in The Field of Improvisation as ecological, referring back to German zoologist/philosopher Ernst Haeckel who saw ecology as “the science of the relations between the organisms and the environmental outer world” (Haeckel 1866, cited in Cobussen 2017, p. 28).

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INSTANCE: An archive that present an ongoing action. 

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INSTANCE: An archive that present an ongoing action. 

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Bak.ma is an interesting digital archive project that raises questions in relation to collaborative archiving practice, authorship, accessibility and sustainability.

bak.ma is an online open video archive that was created to host and share visual records taken during the Gezi Park protests by the Videoccupy video collective, founded during the resistance by people with different experiences and backgrounds. From Gezi to Tekel workers resistance, from 19 January to Hewsel, it aims to reveal the near history of Turkey with audio-visual recordings, documentations and testimonies.

Even though the Videoccupy was disbanded after the resistance ended, the bak.ma and Gezi archive were launched on an online platform in 2014. Since 2015, bak.ma activists have continued to expand the platform by gathering various other visual archives of collectives, unions as well as individuals. Consequently, it has turned into an archive collective that has been active for the last six years.

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Further reading:

Archiving Spaciocide: Video — Topographies

Pelin Tan and Özge Çelikaslan https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/archiving-spaciocide-video-topographies/

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Archives are the documentary by-product of human activity retained for their long-term value. The records created in the course of the everyday lives and actions of individuals and organisations offer direct insights into past events.

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Creation, production, bringing forth, emergence. To produce into presence. Poiesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term [ποιεῖν], which means "to make".

Poiesis has been explored in its relationship to different practices of thought. In Aristotle, poiesis is aligned with imitation through representation (mimesis) in the context of re-enactments on stage.

By the 16th century, Sir Philipp Sidney defends poetry as a means of exceeding given forms in nature, i.e. invention is placed before imitation (The Defence of Poesy, 1595).

In Heidegger, the function of poiesis could be described as opening the relation between language and thinking, giving poetry truth-revealing abilities. "The poet possesses the qualities of a thinker and the thinker takes on an element

of the poetic" (Alexandra J. Pell, 2012).

In modernist and avant-garde practice, the relationship to materiality comes to the fore. This moves poetics and poiesis beyond the realm of the literary production of poetry. This is taken up by different artists who explore language and film under the concept of film poetics, among them Maya Daren, Raul Ruiz, and Abigail Child.

Poiesis and film open up a dynamic where the material manifestation of (moving) images enter a relationship with language, thus film poetics becomes a specific practice of meaning-making through material combinations of language, image, and sound.

In an instance of poiesis from a phenomenological perspective, Bachelard builds a description of the poetic image in relation to space, making a connection to spatial experiencing and poetic reverberation. "In Bachelard’s view, the authentically poetic image emerges from a form of forgetting or not-knowing that “is not ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge,” thus poiesis is the moment when knowledge deviates from its linear progression and where its concepts are displaced or transformed (Joan Ockman, 2023).

Nathan Brown observes how "The theory and practice of making, poiesis, traverses any particular art form, drawing the methods and materials of discrepant productive practices into relation, articulating their common conceptual, formal, and ideological problems across boundaries between specific media, institutional contexts, and disciplinary protocols."

What creates contested ground is that "when you study poiesis you are doing it through the medium that you are investigating, 'and this infinitely reflexive structure inscribes it within the perpetual making of what it observes' (Nathan Brown, p. 8)

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According to Theatre Glossary by Patrice Pavis, choreography is every movement on stage, every stilistic reproduction of a natural gesture, while the choreographic dimension is owned by every organization of symbols.

With advancements in the application of dramaturgy across art forms, including notably, within the discourse on curating, concepts of 'the choreographic' are being introduced. In 2014 Jenn Joy began to scope the possibilities: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262526357/the-choreographic/

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"I use the term ' poetic " here not in the theoretical sense of the study of or theory about literature, but in it practical and applied sense, as the tools designed or located by writers and artists to initiate movement and change. That is, "poetic as a

sort of applied poetic, in the sense that engineering is a form of applied mathematics " (Bernstein, "Optimism" 151 ).. In: Fred Wah, Faking It, Poetics and Hybridity, Critical Writings (2000)

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The term discrete describes something that is non continuous, made of individually distinct parts. It can be a set of values that are either finite or infinitely countable.