[-empyre-] Welcome to Week One: On Contamination-slowness

[Catherine Grau]

Hello everyone, and thank you Renate for hosting and introducing this
difficult subject of contamination.


I would like to introduce myself by approaching this topic from two
different starting points.

1.
To begin, I feel compelled to analyze that even though I've been working
with and on explicitly contaminated sites for a few years, it wasn't until
this year that I really opened myself more deeply to encountering
contamination. I think it's part coping mechanism, part privilege to
witness / see / hear about contamination as separate from our bodies
(unless we are life-threateningly ill, and even then). By way of the
dominant western culture, many of us build and enforce these mental
boundaries where places are labelled and confined as distant / separate
from us.
As part of my art practice, I have spent many years (and a long way to go)
exploring ways of unlearning my western (mis)education - and rooting that
practice in re-weaving the deeper connections or belonging to an
inter-dependent, living, breathing world. That path for me has been to work
through the body and reclaiming somatic ways of knowing. Funny enough, when
that work lead me to work with post-industrial / urban / contaminated
sites, I distanced my somatic awareness and retreated to the safer space of
cerebral, critical discourse. I didn't explore contamination as part of "my
body". Through a slow process of artistic collaborations and exploration,
this is the place I am trying to work in and through currently: belonging
to an inter-dependent, living, breathing, contaminated, dying world. A much
more painful place to be present in.

2.
My friend and collaborator in this discussion, Marisa Tesauro, who you will
hear from shortly, gave me a starter dough (an Italian version of
sourdough) with which to start making my own bread. We had both been
struggling to various degrees with health issues that we situated in our
gut and were both interested in examining the food-health connection.
Eventually, what this opened my eyes to was glyphosate* contamination in
flour (*glyphosate is the most commonly used and misused herbicide and crop
desiccant in monoculture crops) - something I had been completely unaware
of. And glyphosate is just one of the hundreds of residual trace chemicals
that enter our bodies through the commercial food supply.
Through a slow but constant exposure to the rising panic / confusion /
awareness (mostly experienced via news feeds, facebook linked articles, and
online research), I have now arrived at glimpsing the truth(s) of and a
total sense of loss as to what is in (or not in) our food supply. I feel
like I have completely lost my sense of knowing (or become aware of never
having "known") when it comes to what I thought I knew about food / food
production.
If glyphosate is one of the main gut-killers in our food supply, then what
is the antidote to reclaim our "gut-knowing"... our "*neurodependencies on
the microbiome"* to quote Valentin Cadieux and link back to the beginning
of the discussions on multi-species worlding in last months discussion.

Marisa and I would like to start off this discussion by honing in on the
concept of *residual contamination* - as a place of linking back to our
bodies and a way of disruption the narrative of static and confined notions
of place.


Looking forward to thinking through this together!
Catherine

--
Catherine Grau
///\\\///\\\///\\\///\\\
EPA - environmentalperformanceagency.com
chancecologies.com




On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 10:26 PM, Renate Terese Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello empyeans and a warm welcome to this month’s topic on
> -empyre-soft-skinned space, On Contamination.
>
> Riffing off from last month’s topic choreographed by Margaretha Haughwout,
> Radical Aesthetics of Multispecies Worlding, Eco-Art, and Solidarity in a
> More-than-human Capitalocene, we are inspired this month to think broadly
> about contamination. I have seriously been contemplating (more like
> panicking) over the topic of Contamination.  I have been thinking  about
> how contamination creeps and has a slowness about it. How a contaminated
> environment can take years to clear. What kinds of thresholds determine
> whether something is contaminated?  Is contamination different than
> toxicity? Whether virtual or real, the broad concept of contamination seems
> like a potential topic worth to consider for its broad practical and
> conceptual potential.
>
> We welcome, Marisa Tesauro and Catherine Grau, new participants of
> -empyre  for Week One On Contamination.  We look forward to them sharing
> their creative work and their ideas that relate to our topic. Their
> biographies are below.
>
> We have a number of artists and creative writers this month and I wanted
> to remind everyone that images or creative pieces can be posted on our
> -empyre platform in the form of .jpgs but also on our Facebook Page
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/empyrelistserv/ or on Twitter
> @empyrelistserv <https://twitter.com/empyrelistserv>
> Please tell your friends about our discussion and encourage them to post
> freely on our forum this month.
>
> Looking forward to our discussion.
> Renate
>
> Bios
> Catherine Grau (DE, US) works as interdisciplinary artist, facilitator,
> and curator in the overlapping fields of critical pedagogy, feminist
> somatic practices, post-industrial ecology and land use – focused on
> re-imagining / re-claiming relationships to land and re-covering
> /re-embodying marginalized modes of knowing. Her practice and projects
> emerge from and situate within context / place, often employing
> installation, props, signage, public actions, workshops, encounters, and
> performance scores as a means of facilitating shifts in thinking, behavior
> and perception.
>
> Catherine holds a BFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute and a MFA in
> Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University. She is
> engaged in a long-term collaboration with artist Zoe Kreye in an on-going
> project called “Unlearning Practices”. In 2015 Catherine co-founded Chance
> Ecologies – a curatorial
> platform for artistic research on ecological adaptation and resilience in
> post-industrial / post-human sites and landfills in New York City, which
> involves over 20 artists. In 2017 she co-founded the artist collective EPA
> – Environmental Performance Agency, together with andrea haenggi, Ellie
> Irons, Christopher Kennedy, and the urban weeds of 1067 Pacific Street,
> which explores narratives of multi-species agency, embodied and somatic
> forms of knowing, and environmental activism.
>
> Marisa Tesauro (IT,US) is an artist who works in sculpture, installation
> and site-specific intervention. Her work examines contemporary societies
> and the built environment and she often works in collaboration with other
> professionals in the fields of archeology and anthropology. Her work
> reflects on the dynamics of ruin, relics and debris for their unique way of
> telling history despite being only fragments of a bigger story and the
> intersection of nature´s course and the intervention of man at play. Her
> work
> also questions what we use and consume, how we use objects and navigate
> our built environments focusing on the consumption-waste cycle.
>
> Marisa has participated in a number of projects with Chance Ecologies, a
> curatorial platform for artistic research on ecological adaptation and
> resilience in post-industrial / post-human sites and landfills in New York
> City, which involves over 20 artists including her project Construction
> Burial Sites: This Immense, Organic Sprawl at the Queens Museum of Art and
> the site-specific intervention of the same project at Hunters Point South
> in Queens. Her Solo exhibition in conjunction with the University
> of Florence Department of Archeology at the Museum La Specola in Florence
> entitled Miti Oggi Ruderi Domani included a number of works and an
> installation that were based on the consumption-waste cycle as objects and
> spaces are today´s legends and tomorrow’s ruins. Other exhibitions include
> Scent, Dickinson Roundell, NY, NY, Bay Ridge SAW, NY, NY, A Remix of
> Abundance: Constructing Sustainability, ARTECHO, NY, NY, BRONX CALLING:THE
> SECOND AIM BIENNIAL, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, Out of the Ruins:
> Reimagining the Romantic Tradition, Newton Art Center, Newton, MA , This
> Side of Paradise, No Longer Empty at The Andrew Freedman Home, Bronx, NY
> and Via Roma 2 <https://maps.google.com/?q=Via+Roma+2&entry=gmail&source=g>,
> Site-specific Installation in Monasterace, Italy. Tesauro has published two
> artist books, Strutture, with Content Series and Relics in the Construction
> of Place based on her research for the Construction Burial Sites at Hunter´s
> Point South. She has recently participated in NYFA Bootcamp and her awards
> and residencies include Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Studio
> in the Park residency at the Queens Museum, Foundation for Contemporary
> Arts Emergency Grant, AIM Program at the Bronx Museum, Full
> Fellowship Award Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Marisa Tesauro
> holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by
> the Artist
> Pension Trust.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Renate Ferro
> Visiting Associate Professor
> Director of Undergraduate Studies
> Department of Art
> Tjaden Hall 306
> rferro at cornell.edu
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 11/5/17, 10:00 PM, "Renate Terese Ferro" <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:
>
> >Welcome to November 2017 on –empyre- soft-skinned space
> >Contamination Moderated by Renate Ferro with guests
> >Week 1: November 5: Marisa Tesauro (DE, US), Catherine Grau (IT, US)
> >Week 2:November 12 Bishnupriya Ghosh (US), Tim Murray (US)
> >Week 3: November 19 Rahul Mukherjee, Andrea Haenggi (DE,US)
> >Week 4: November 26 Amy Sara Carroll (US), Ricardo Dominguez (US),
> Melinda Rackham (AU), Christina McPhee (US)
> >The world is contaminated. From our environment to bio-networks to
> language, communication, and relationships, to governments and financial
> >markets, to the digital spaces of bits and the virtual, the “digital
> delirium” of the present, both the real and the virtual are mixed together
> in a bubbling stew of contaminated waste.
> >
> >Contamination is omnipresent. We ask our  –empyre- soft-skinned space
> guests and subscribers to consider what it might take to detox from
> contamination on a local and regional level but also beyond to our global
> world. How can we consider the theoretical and actual construct of
> contamination as it relates to the flow between real and virtual networks.
> How can artists, poets, writers, philosophers, theorists, and others think
> through contamination to imagine the potentials for the future?
> >Moderator:
> >
> >Renate Ferro  (US) is a conceptual artist working in emerging technology
> and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum
> (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA
> (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University
> Berlin (Germany). Her work has been published in such journals as
> Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a managing moderator for the
> online new media list serve -empyre-soft-skinned space. Ferro is a Visiting
> Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department
> of Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also
> directs the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Interdisciplinary
> Research.
> >
> >Weekly Guests:
> >Amy Sara Carroll (US) is the author of two collections of poetry
> SECESSION (Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press,
> 2012) and FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography
> (Fordham University Press, 2013), chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2012
> Poets Out Loud Prize. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic
> Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant
> Tool, which has been included in several art exhibitions, including the
> 2010 California Biennial. With EDT 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab and the University of
> Michigan interdisciplinary workshop, the Border Collective, she
> collaboratively authored [({    })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de
> sobrevivencia del desierto (The Office of Net Assessment/University of
> Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, 2014), that
> digitally has been redistributed under its Creative Commons license by
> CTheory Books (2015), the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 3 (2016),
> >CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital (2016), and HemiPress
> (2017). In 2015, Carroll served as the University of Mississippi Summer
> Poet in Residence. Summer 2010 and every summer thereafter, she has
> participated in Mexico City’s alternative arts space SOMA. Carroll’s
> monograph REMEX: Toward an Art History of
> >the NAFTA Era is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in
> December 2017 under the auspices of its Mellon Latin American and Caribbean
> >Arts and Culture publishing initiative. Currently, Carroll is a 2017-2018
> Society Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities where she
> is working on two projects: “Codeswitch,” a mixed genre collection,
> coauthored with Ricardo Dominguez, that undocuments the development and
> >distribution of the Transborder Immigrant Tool; and “Global Mexico’s
> Coproduction,” the second volume in a trilogy that she’s
> >composing on greater Mexican art, literature, and cinema.
> >
> >Ricardo Dominguez (US) is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance
> Theater, a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity
> with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. Dominguez
> developed his recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab
> project titled The
> >Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing
> the Mexico/U.S. border) with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy
> >Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand (http://tbt.tome.press/). The project
> was the winner of the Transnational Communities Award (2008), an award
> funded by Cultural Contact,
> >Endowment for Culture Mexico–U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in
> Mexico.
> >
> >Along with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, and Amy Sara Carroll,
> Dominguez is also a co-founder of particle group, the creator of an art
> project about
> >nanotoxicology titled Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market (
> http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro). Dominguez
> >is an associate professor in the visual arts department and M.F.A.
> director at the University of California–San Diego, a Hellman Fellow,
> principal
> >investigator at Qualcomm Institute/California Institute for
> Telecommunications and Information Technology, and a Society for the
> Humanities Fellow at Cornell
> >University (2017–18) and Rockefeller Arts and Literary Fellow (2018 - 19).
> >
> >Bishnupriya Ghosh (US) teaches  global media studies at UC Santa
> Barbara’s Departments of English and Global Studies. Her first monograph,
> When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel
> (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed cultural globalization and the market for
> world literatures; and her second,  Global Icons: Apertures into the Global
> (Duke UP, 2011) focused on globally circulating iconic images that
> constitute media environments. Around 2009, Ghosh turned to research on
> risk media from perspectives in the humanities. Both her current projects
> arise from this turn: she is writing her third monograph, *The Virus Touch:
> Theorizing Epidemic Media,* and co-editing *The Routledge Handbook on Media
> and Risk* (forthcoming 2018).
> >
> >Catherine Grau (DE, US) works as interdisciplinary artist, facilitator,
> and curator in the overlapping fields of critical pedagogy, feminist
> somatic practices, post-industrial ecology and land use – focused on
> re-imagining / re-claiming relationships to land and re-covering
> /re-embodying marginalized modes of knowing. Her practice and projects
> emerge from and situate within context / place, often employing
> installation, props, signage, public actions, workshops, encounters, and
> performance scores as a means of facilitating shifts in thinking, behavior
> and perception.
> >
> >Catherine holds a BFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute and a MFA in
> Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University. She is
> engaged in a long-term collaboration with artist Zoe Kreye in an on-going
> project called “Unlearning Practices”. In 2015 Catherine co-founded Chance
> Ecologies – a curatorial
> >platform for artistic research on ecological adaptation and resilience in
> post-industrial / post-human sites and landfills in New York City, which
> involves over 20 artists. In 2017 she co-founded the artist collective EPA
> – Environmental Performance Agency, together with andrea haenggi, Ellie
> Irons, Christopher Kennedy, and the urban weeds of 1067 Pacific Street,
> which explores narratives of multi-species agency, embodied and somatic
> forms of knowing, and environmental activism.
> >
> >Andrea Haenggi CH, US) Andrea s a Brooklyn-based artist and choreographer
> from Switzerland, who has been making work independently and
> collaboratively since 1998. She is known for pushing boundaries. Her work
> deals with kinesthesia, affect, perception and sensation in the digital
> age. Since two years her performers and co-creators are with spontaneous
> urban plants. The choreographic practice shoots out to explore themes of
> feminism, immigration, colonization and vegetal philosophies. The
> >radicle goes into the cracks, looking at value, emotional labor and care.
> She has been commissioned to create performances for Dance Theater Workshop
> (New York), the Queens Museum (New York), MASS MoCA (North Adams), the
> Transart Triennial (Berlin), New Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), SPAN Festival
> (Lagos, Nigeria) among many others. She is the catalyst of the research and
> performance laboratory 1067 PacificPeople in Brooklyn. She taught movement
> workshops in the
> >USA, Berlin, Zurich, China and Nigeria and is on the faculty of the
> Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York. Haenggi holds a
> MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute/Plymouth University UK and
> is a Swiss Canton Solothurn Dance Price 2008 recipient.
> http://weedychoreography.com <http://weedychoreography.com/> ;
> http://andreahaenggi.net <http://andreahaenggi.net/> ;
> http://1067pacificpeople.nyc <http://1067pacificpeople.nyc/>
> >
> >Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction,
> shadowing figures and contingent effects. Her work emulates potential forms
> of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined
> ecologies.
> >
> >Christina McPhee’s work is in the museum collections of the Whitney
> Museum of American Art, New Museum-Rhizome Artbase, and International
> Center for Photography, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas
> City; and Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland. Solo museum
> exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., and
> Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. She has participated in group exhibitions,
> notably with documenta 12 (Magazine Project), Bucharest Biennial 3, Museum
> of Modern Art Medellin, Bildmuseet Umea, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film
> Archive, California Museum of Photography/Digital Studio, and the Institute
> of Contemporary Art (ICA), London. Born in Pomona, California in 1954, she
> studied at Scripps College, Claremont and Kansas City Art Institute (BFA);
> she was a student of Philip Guston during his last year of life and
> teaching, at Boston University (MFA painting 1979).  She has taught at
> Kansas City Art Institute and the
> >University of California-Santa Cruz in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA
> program.  In 2012, she won a MAP Fund for Performance grant with Pamela Z,
> >for the production of Carbon Song Cycle, which premiered at Berkeley Art
> Museum / Pacific Film Archive and at Roulette, Brooklyn, in 2013.  She
> lives and works inCalifornia.
> >Christina McPhee: A Commonplace Book <https://punctumbooks.com/
> titles/christina-mcphee-a-commonplace-book/> is forthcoming in fall, 2017
> >with Punctum Books.
> >http://www.christinamcphee.net <http://www.christinamcphee.net/>
> >
> >Rahul Mukherjee
> >
> >Tim Murray (US) is Professor of Comparative Literature and English and
> Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell
> Library. A curator of new media and contemporary art, and theorist of
> visual studies and digital culture, he has been forging international
> intersections in exhibition and print between the arts, humanities, and
> technology for over twenty-five years. He is currently the Director of
> Cornell Council for the Arts. He has been a moderator for -empyre since
> 2007..
> >
> >A recipient of fellowships and grants from NEA, NEH, Mellon, Rockefeller,
> Fulbright, and Korea National Research Foundation, Murray is currently
> working on a book, Archival Events @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to
> Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).
> Among his publications are the books Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art
> Technologically (Universidad de Murcia, forthcoming, 2017), Zonas de
> Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma:
> Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge,
> 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas
> (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In
> XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith,
> Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture
> (Minnesota, 1998), ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of
> Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. Xu
> Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin), co-edited with Yang
> Shin-Yi (Beijing: Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), and ed. with Irving Goh
> of The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy, 2 Vols., diacritics
> (2014-16).
> >
> >
> >Melinda Rackham (AU)
> >When the internet was young Melinda Rackham wove tales of intimacy and
> identity online.  Her Phd investigated the soft bounds of virtual reality
> space and she founded the global -empyre- forum. She was ACMI’s first
> Network Art curator and led Australia’s foremost art and technology
> organization, ANAT. Melinda writes on social justice and
> >contemporary art, making and design. Her recent publications Catherine
> Truman -Touching Distance, explores the many facets of a jeweller working
> with medical
> >researchers, while the ADOPTED anthology presents poetry and prose from
> adult adoptees on loss, trauma and reclaiming self.
> >
> >Currently Adjunct Research Professor in the University of South
> Australia’s School of Art, Architecture and Design she divides her time
> between Adelaide and Pukatja (Ernabella) in the Central Australian APY
> Lands.
> >
> >Marisa Tesauro (IT,US) is an artist who works in sculpture, installation
> and site-specific intervention. Her work examines contemporary societies
> and the built environment and she often works in collaboration with other
> professionals in the fields of archeology and anthropology. Her work
> reflects on the dynamics of ruin, relics and debris for their unique way of
> telling history despite being only fragments of a bigger story and the
> intersection of nature´s course and the intervention of man at play. Her
> work
> >also questions what we use and consume, how we use objects and navigate
> our built environments focusing on the consumption-waste cycle.
> >
> >Marisa has participated in a number of projects with Chance Ecologies, a
> curatorial platform for artistic research on ecological adaptation and
> resilience in post-industrial / post-human sites and landfills in New York
> City, which involves over 20 artists including her project Construction
> Burial Sites: This Immense, Organic Sprawl at the Queens Museum of Art and
> the site-specific intervention of the same project at Hunters Point South
> in Queens. Her Solo exhibition in conjunction with the University
> >of Florence Department of Archeology at the Museum La Specola in Florence
> entitled Miti Oggi Ruderi Domani included a number of works and an
> installation that were based on the consumption-waste cycle as objects and
> spaces are today´s legends and tomorrow’s ruins. Other exhibitions include
> Scent, Dickinson Roundell, NY, NY, Bay Ridge SAW, NY, NY, A Remix of
> Abundance: Constructing Sustainability, ARTECHO, NY, NY, BRONX CALLING:THE
> SECOND AIM BIENNIAL, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, Out of the Ruins:
> Reimagining the Romantic Tradition, Newton Art Center, Newton, MA , This
> Side of Paradise, No Longer Empty at The Andrew Freedman Home, Bronx, NY
> and Via Roma 2 <https://maps.google.com/?q=Via+Roma+2&entry=gmail&source=g>,
> Site-specific Installation in Monasterace, Italy. Tesauro has published two
> artist books, Strutture, with Content Series and Relics in the Construction
> of Place based on her research for the Construction Burial Sites at Hunter´s
> >Point South. She has recently participated in NYFA Bootcamp and her
> awards and residencies include Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant,
> Studio
> >in the Park residency at the Queens Museum, Foundation for Contemporary
> Arts Emergency Grant, AIM Program at the Bronx Museum, Full
> >Fellowship Award Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Marisa Tesauro
> holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by
> the Artist
> >Pension Trust.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >Renate Ferro
> >Visiting Associate Professor
> >Director of Undergraduate Studies
> >Department of Art
> >Tjaden Hall 306
> >rferro at cornell.edu
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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