[-empyre-] Beginning Week 1: Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements

[Lissette Olivares]

Dear Margaretha et al.

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.

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. 

In eco-critical solidarity,
lissette

Lissette Olivares
Co Director & Founder
Sin Kabeza Productions <http://www.sinkabeza.com/>
http://www.sinkabeza.com/architecture <http://www.sinkabeza.com/architecture>
Phone:(917) 213-9820
Email: liolivares at fulbrightmail.org




> On Oct 3, 2017, at 1:10 AM, margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Greetings to all on this list and the many species that surround you,
> 
> I'd love for the conversations with Valentine, Lissette, and Randall to seed and nourish our coming weeks together:
> 
> 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.  
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> Warmly,
> -Margaretha
> 
> ---
> 
> 
> Week 1: Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements
> 
> Valentine Cadieux
> 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. 
> 
> 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.
>  
> 
> Lissette T. Olivares
> 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.
> 
> 
> Randall Szott
> 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.
> 
> 
> Guest:
> Antonio Roman-Alcala
> 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 antidogmatist.com <http://antidogmatist.com/>, 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!
> 
> --
> beforebefore.net <http://beforebefore.net/>
> guerrillagrafters.org <http://guerrillagrafters.org/>
> coastalreadinggroup.com <http://coastalreadinggroup.com/>
> --
> 
> 
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