<div dir="ltr">Thank you, Lisette, Margaretha, and those joining,<div><br>I’m trying to figure out what would make the word terroirism fit in my mouth. Especially on a day (in addition to the racoons) when people on the land where I live are waking up ruminating about what causes a wealthy white man who sends big tins of cookies to his mother to engage in mass shootings with automatic weapons, the associations with territorial terror complicate my morning’s intent to make cookies for my own godmother, and seem to demand an accounting of how we live in myriad relations without losing our shit.<br><br>So for the moment, as a way to start into that question via the aesthetics of ecological practice, let me articulate what I love about /becoming with/ the edaphon, why keeping our shit together seems valuable and accountable to that body of organisms, and why these still make me uncomfortable, productively, about terroirism.<br><br>As a geographer, I often reflect on how decentering humans in our regenerative exploratory practices often starts by recognizing the disproportionate importance of local relationships in our awareness, especially relationships we have to imagine. My soil relationships are not just where I live. In fact, the vast majority of them are mediated through circuits of capital — with ecoaesthetic implications that make us crazy, both ethically and, as we understand more and more about our neurodependencies on the microbiome, literally. <br><br>So while it may be relatively possible to recognize that a handful — a spoonful, as people often say, despite not often spooning soil — of earth enrolls me in more relationships than with all the other people on earth, I’m not sure I know how to practice relating to the communities of more distant soil, beyond general decolonizing, anti-oppressive, and accountability strategies. Figuring out how not to spread my shit beyond where I can possibly be responsible to the relations it creates is one thing; imagining that it is possible to be held in so many relations maybe provides a supportive start for feeling supported by entanglements, and able to wholeheartedly engage terroir without fundamentalism, defensive localism, or possessiveness.<br><br>Making peace,<br>Valentine</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Lissette Olivares <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:liolivares@fulbrightmail.org" target="_blank">liolivares@fulbrightmail.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div style="word-wrap:break-word">Dear Margaretha et al.<div><br><div>To begin with thank you so much for the invitation to participate in this forum and the opportunity to learn about the works of others in the struggle to destruct anthroposupremacy. Here are some reflections to feed the fire.</div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-family:HelveticaNeue">As I drove to work today I was pierced by the vision of three raccoons who made the fatal decision to try and cross the concrete division of the superhighway during a crepuscular rush of traffic. I wince each time I see one splayed out on the concrete for I recognize all too well their position, the way their heads are gripped by their prehensile hands, the way their bodies curl in a type of fetal position, behaviors I have often seen them use to protect themselves. Their bodies are fresh additions to what feels like a never ending tally of woodland creatures who I try to make note of daily, as a small ritual of remembrance, a conscious effort to not just look away, to not just deviate my attention while participating in my own daily grind of survival. Yesterday, in the early morning hours as I walked my Matsya, an Indian dog from Goa, I almost stepped on a piece of a possum’s liver that lied ahead of the rest of their body, flipped inside out from the impact of thousands of pounds coupled with speed. I was told by a wildlife rehabilitation that it’s important to check fresh possum corpses on the side of the road, because if a jill, their marsupial pouches might be full of joeys, and so despite my body’s resistance, despite the sadness, I go to check and am relieved that I will not have to figure out what to do with a litter of orphans. For many this may seem to be a position of privilege, to feel concern for creatures, when on these same streets, a police state with officers armed to the hilt, is busy at work seeking out the rebels and enemies of a settler state, native, brown, and black bodies, bodies marked as masculine, feminine, cuir, illegal, criminal, who have been under attack since at least the time when Columbus and Conquistadores sailed the ocean blue. Yet, what I believe, what I hope to contribute here, is that these stories are not disconnected, they are not discrete, but rather what Karen Barad has encouraged us to perceive as entanglements, with anti-disciplinary and intradisciplinary knowledges, such as indigenous studies, critical race studies, trans*studies, disability studies, multi species studies, feminist studies, decolonial studies, offering us tools with which to enact foundational paradigm shifts. </span></div><div><br></div><div>In eco-critical solidarity,</div><div>lissette</div><div><br><div>
<div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px">Lissette Olivares<br>Co Director & Founder<br><a href="http://www.sinkabeza.com" target="_blank">Sin Kabeza Productions</a><br><a href="http://www.sinkabeza.com/architecture" target="_blank">http://www.sinkabeza.com/<wbr>architecture</a></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px">Phone:(917) 213-9820<br>Email: <a href="mailto:liolivares@fulbrightmail.org" target="_blank">liolivares@fulbrightmail.org</a></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px"><br><br><br></div></div></div>
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<br><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Oct 3, 2017, at 1:10 AM, margaretha haughwout <<a href="mailto:margaretha.anne.haughwout@gmail.com" target="_blank">margaretha.anne.haughwout@<wbr>gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="m_-6153619851492861177Apple-interchange-newline"><div>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<div dir="ltr">Greetings to all on this list and the many species that surround you,<br><br>I'd love for the conversations with Valentine, Lissette, and Randall to seed and nourish our coming weeks together:<br><br>We
must begin by asking -- what are the radical aesthetics of our
ecological practice? How do we fuse politics and aesthetics in the
more-than-human Capitalocene? How do we understand the work of
de-centering the human and art making, and how does the collapse of the
nature/culture binary figure for us as multispecies artists, activists,
collaborative worlders? Indeed, Lissette's multispecies architecture and
decolonial laboratory introduce engagements that undo conceptions of
nature as ahistorical or apolitical. <br><br>And, how do systems figure
in our understanding of ecological practice? Randall and Valentine
call for a soil practice, a 'terroirism' that transforms social practice
from a model of art making wholly tied to neoliberalism to a
regenerative art system that can recuperate ecologies and re/generate
matrices of relationships between humans and non-humans. They introduce
ecoaesthetic systems.<br><br>Systems and entanglements. Do systems and
systems theory inform our radical aesthetics of multispecies worlding
and ecological art in the Capitalocene? What happens to our systems and
our designs when we tangle with other species? Do our entanglements
uphold our systems, our designs, our architectures? which ones?<br><br>Warmly,<br>-Margaretha<br><br>---<br><br><br>Week 1: Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements<br><br>Valentine Cadieux<br>Professor
Valentine Cadieux is Director of Environmental Studies and
Sustainability at Hamline University. Using art and science approaches
to society-environment relations and specifically the political ecology
and moral economy of agrifood systems, she builds publicly-engaged
participatory research processes for students and members of the public
to learn together about differing ways of understanding environments,
and to practice performing and justifying environmental and food system
interventions in collaborative ways. <br><br>Her research and teaching
focus on how social and environmental practices can help people
negotiate aspirations for equitable, healthy, and sustainable food
systems and residential landscapes. She has developed a public Food and
Society workshop for building collaborative knowledge tools that help
communities build food systems. These tools focus on valuing existing
community assets and capacity — and on understanding what practices can
make food chain relationships sustainable and just, and can repair
social and ecological traumas that have resulted from food production
methods.<br> <br><br>Lissette T. Olivares<br>Lissette T. Olivares is the
co-founder and co-director of Sin Kabeza Productions, an activist
collective of researchers who work together as symbionts. She is a
graduate of Vassar College, Peking University, the History of
Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Between 2010 and 2012
she was an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School
of Individualized Studies where she was supported by an NYU Provost
Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity. In 2012 SKP produced
their first architectural intervention, SEEDBANK: An eco evo devo design
fiction in the SF Mode, designed for posthumanist research at
dOCUMENTA(13), which was published in the Lodz Museum’s Urban Ecologies
program. After an unexpected encounter with an orphaned hedgehog in
Kassel Lissette became committed to wildlife rehabilitation and
multispecies architecture, and has worked with Indian dogs, raccoons,
squirrels, and white tailed deer. Between 2015-2016 she was a research
fellow at Terreform ONE where she collaborated on the Modular Edible
Cricket Farm while investigating “Speculative architecture and design
for a Post Anthropos/Anthropocene.” In 2016 Lissette was selected as a
rapporteur for the Feral Technologies: Unmaking Multispecies Dumps work
group at the HKW’s Anthropocene Campus. She was invited to present SKP’s
multispecies architectural platform at the Yinchuan Biennale
Conference, while their designs were featured at the NGBK gallery in
Berlin as part of the Animal Lovers exhibition. Her intradisciplinary
research has been supported by the Fulbright Fellowship, Jacob K. Javits
Fellowship, ICI-Berlin Curatorial Fellowship, and A Blade of Grass’
Artist Files Fellowship, which recognizes socially engaged art
production. Lissette and SKP are currently engaged in a coevolutionary
dream that envisions a refuge, research, and rehabilitation center for
dis/placed and dis/abled wildlife that will also serve as a decolonial
laboratory for eco and bio artist activist research.<br><br><br>Randall Szott<br>Randall
Szott is a writer, chef and former merchant mariner. He has an MFA in
Art Critical Practices, an MA in Creative Arts, and an interdisciplinary
BA with a minor in philosophy. He has given presentations at The San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California College of the Arts, the
University of Houston, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee among
others. His writing, commentary and interviews have been published and
cited widely including the recent books Say It While You Still Mean It:
Conversations on Art and Practice, and I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing
About In My Song: How Artists Make and Live Lives of Meaning. He
recently was invited to participate in a three week National Endowment
for the Humanities summer institute: Space, Place and the Humanities. He
lives in Barnard, VT where he has been collaboratively developing a ten
acre parcel of land using a variety of regenerative agriculture
techniques. There is a small permaculture test plot on the site, as well
as a dye garden, small elderberry orchard, and a two acre vineyard. He
has studied mushroom cultivation with Tradd Cotter and regenerative
agriculture with Darren J Doherty. His work as a chef has involved farm
to table restaurants, cooking at sea, and farm to school education for a
small elementary school. His ongoing research has involved the
intersection of soil + social practice.<br><br><br>Guest:<br>Antonio Roman-Alcala<br>Antonio
Roman-Alcalá is an educator, researcher, writer, and organizer based in
Berkeley, California who has worked for just sustainable food and
political systems for the past 15 years. Antonio co-founded San
Francisco’s Alemany Farm, the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance,
and the California Food Policy Council, and his 2010 documentary film,
In Search of Good Food, can be viewed free online. He holds a BA from UC
Berkeley, and an MA from ISS in The Hague. Currently, Antonio maintains
the blog <a href="http://antidogmatist.com/" target="_blank">antidogmatist.com</a>,
teaches with the Urban Permaculture Institute and at UC Santa Cruz,
conducts activist-scholar research, and leads the North American
Agroecology Organizing Project. He is also in search of new land to farm
– a tough prospect in the urbanized and gentrified San Francisco Bay
Area!<div><div class="m_-6153619851492861177gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><br>--<br></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(204,204,204)"><a href="http://beforebefore.net/" target="_blank">beforebefore.net</a><br><a href="http://guerrillagrafters.org/" target="_blank">guerrillagrafters.org</a><br><a href="http://coastalreadinggroup.com/" target="_blank">coastalreadinggroup.com</a></span><br><div>--</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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