[-empyre-] Turtles upon Turtles

Tue Oct 10 10:10:02 AEDT 2017

I love you Elaine.  My email also was disorienting to the conversation, because I had been drafting it earlier and hadn’t fully read Elaine's response before sending because I was afraid my week was up and I hadn’t sent it in time. So, I’m not rebutting Elaine’s refusal.  Queerly, I remember the movie Gone with the Wind, of Scarlett O’Hara being forced to wear black when she wants to have fun and wear color and be courted but she’s stuck in dull black (of course Rhett still thinks she’s still fetching), and I remember my young self wanting to be Scarlett not understanding how fucked up that movie is in its attempt to erase the Black suffering of slavery, and making this space in theaters for white women to cry over Scarlett's lost love with Rhett Butler (which is really about the white mourning of slavery being over)  and not over the fact that the capitalist world order is made possible through the subjection and exploitation of bodies and earthly matter, what Jason Moore calls “cheap nature”, a concept which is on my mind because of the feminist curator Joanna Sokolowska, who is concerned about artists who perform care-work, who take up what Elaine is asking us all to do, to act, to change the world we live in. Change our mode of attention, even if it begins with only a pause, like Brian who has learned “to drive more slowly around the bends of our little canyon road so I have better chances of not hitting any of the many deer that stumble and nimble and amble around here,” or when Norie Neumark tells us about her project “Waiting” where she and Maria Miranda were inspired "to work with animals in ways that could be a collaboration rather than instrumental use.”  I also find myself attuned to Margaretha’s question, “who wants to grieve?” and I remember a sense of panic after death, of not feeling, of going numb, of wondering if I had lost the ability to feel, of watching a loved one swallowed by grief, melancholia, and of not understanding why I could go on, why I could get up and go to work. It is here that perhaps we might ask about different bodies, about different modes of sensing, for example, the "hyper empathy syndrome” that Lauren Olamina must survive in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, of the evolution of sensoriums, of the gifts and curses bodies do not ask for which both threaten and enable survival. To continue pushing Elaine’s question :"If capitalism is a way of organizing things, as Jason Moore theorizes, then what is a way of making, making-with, kin?” If Elaine wants to bend roads, and redesign our cities and our stomachs, then perhaps a companion architecture should be a bridge, as in A bridge called my back, as in a game of cat’s cradle, a site or mode of bending, a meeting point between worlds.

Elaine, your LA turtles reminded me of this:

"There is no border where· evolution ends and history begins, where genes stop and environment takes up, where culture rules and nature submits, or vice versa. Instead, there are turtles upon turtles of naturecultures all the way down.” (Introduction: A kinship of feminist figurations) 

http://playingcatscradle.blogspot.de/ <http://playingcatscradle.blogspot.de/>

Below, a bridge for crabs. 

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 9, 2017, at 7:32 PM, Elaine Gan <eganuc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear M and all,
> 
> I inadvertently, but perhaps more interestingly, triggered something by saying "I don't want to grieve." As Margaretha and Lissette wisely point out, it wasn't really my main point, but maybe worth a few sentences now to clarify. Yes, grief (along with love and rage) is at the heart of my practice. But it is not my practice, not today, not yet. I don't want to keep burying the slaughtered, raped, maimed, run over, dispossessed. That's become a fulltime job in the Capitalocene and I don't want it. I'd like to work to change infrastructures and technologies that I/we have inherited, that are now doing more harm than good. One way is to make new things thinkable, to propose new imaginaries that might open up more livable socialities—within the terrible toxic dumps that industry has made. Randall posted that sustaining is not enough; I agree. We live in a dump and we can't stay here.
> 
> The main point of my earlier post was critical practice, or agency. What becomes the work of art when we seek to recognize and enable multispecies worlding within industrialized, globalized dumps? No one planned for Echo Park lake to be a habitat for red-eared slider turtles. Nevertheless, here "we" are: non-native naturecultures, contingent beings of historical ruptures and long evolutionary lines. Entangled somehow, where lies agency?
> 
> ...ahhh Columbus day,
> xxElaine
> 
> On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 6:46 AM, margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com <mailto:margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Elaine, and all --
> 
> Of course, who wants to grieve? But also, how can we make kin in the absence of grief? I can't help but think that if we don't grieve we are trapped in anxiety that keeps us away from the present and away from others. Otherwise I can't see a way out of "managing" but not "entangling"...
> 
> I'm not talking about despair, or some over performative acting out, or even sadness. I don't want to make too much of it, but I do think grief is something else -- a kind of radical presence with the trouble, as Haraway puts it, and as Lissette echoes. I think of it as a way of being outside of time, of recognizing the past in the present.
> 
> But yes to the work of art and a way of making with kin....
> 
> The turtles are such a good way of locating this issue of the urge for a totalizing view of how to manage a population and predict its impacts, and also the desire to have indeterminate kin (is that a thing?) Sometimes it is easy for me to flow between these two ways of being, and other times I think they are very much at odds.
> 
> -M
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> beforebefore.net <http://beforebefore.net/>
> guerrillagrafters.org <http://guerrillagrafters.org/>
> coastalreadinggroup.com <http://coastalreadinggroup.com/>
> --
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Elaine Gan <eganuc at gmail.com <mailto:eganuc at gmail.com>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks so much, Margaretha, for bringing us together around these great (and hard) themes. Everyone's posts this week has me thinking about many things—thank you!—but particularly the work of art in what Isabelle Stengers calls "catastrophic times." I don't want to grieve. No, not yet. I want to learn how to live again and again: we are still here and that recognition demands that we make kin, kin through which and with which "we" are being remade. Maybe that's what Margaretha calls "personhood"?— the ability to make kin and keep each other alive when a hurricane, earthquake, or plague of human exceptionalism obliterates "us." 
> 
> I'm interested in radicalities, work(s) of art, that aren't defined entirely by refusal against or critique of the Capitalocene, but by capacities to make kin. I learn this from Donna Haraway: making kin comes before, after, and in between the cracks and crap of capitalism and bourgeois liberalism. I'm looking for propositions for more-than-human worlding, for Haraway's Chthulucene, the "not yet finished, ongoing, abyssal and dreadful ones that are generative and destructive..." I don't want to grieve the road kill. I don't want to care for invasive species and toxic waste. I follow weeds, but I also fear them. I want to learn how we can bend our roads, design our cities and stomachs—so that they do not collide with migration routes of monarch butterflies, breeding grounds of giant catfish, life cycles of too many companions. If capitalism is a way of organizing things, as Jason Moore theorizes, then what is a way of making, making-with, kin? How might we map this double internality? 
> 
> I met a non-native yesterday, hanging out in Echo Park lake (one of the oldest and likely most haunted) in LA. I met several non-natives, in fact, but one that made me stop was a red-eared slider turtle who swam up to me, likely trained to equate people with easy food. These turtles are common, listed on many websites as "cute" little things that make "great household pets." Hundreds live in the lake; most likely, abandoned by owners who decided they just weren't so cute anymore. From what I could find online last night, this group of turtles has only been around since the lake's overhaul in 2012. Of course, my first question was: hey, what happened to the turtles that lived in the lake when it was drained completely for a two-year renovation? The next few questions were harder: are these turtles kin? Are they nature or culture in the Capitalocene or the Chthulucene? What is my/our responsibility to species that we've domesticated, displaced, mutated, and rendered disposable, when they've gone feral and survive outside of human control? Some become road kill. Some become new companions. But others are taking over, creating new indeterminacies (generative and destructive naturecultures). What then is the work of art in attending to these that are changing what it means to be human (and nonhuman)?
> 
> xElaine
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 9:49 AM, Brian Karl <brianbkarl at gmail.com <mailto:brianbkarl at gmail.com>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I've been dipping in and out of Charles Foster's "Being a Beast" of
> late (sub-title: "Adventures Across the Species Divide"), in which he
> rather literally tries to embody a phenomenological experience closer
> to that of a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer and a swift by burrowing
> in and snuffling about closer to the earth for days and weeks at a
> time in the wild. He fully admits the absurdity as well as doomed
> enterprise of this, but meanwhile gets in a lot of philosophizing
> about human species' different relation to nature as well as lots of
> good sensorial thinking about different ways of relating to the
> complex and interactive physical world--what is framed and highlighted
> (or high-smelled or -heard) by different species' sensory organs and
> foraging needs...
> 
> Responding to Margaretha's last inquiry:
> 
> Well, my non-humans of late are pretty diverse: long, ongoing
> relationship continues with Bando, my mostly outdoors Siamese cat, who
> still sleeps with us humans most mornings after long nights
> tree-climbing and...who knows what adventuring.
> 
> We have been together for going on six years, but it's changed and
> deepened in new ways since moving to the edge of a big open space
> trail last year where both he and I encounter different species every
> day--perhaps most spectacularly of late when he led me down the
> beginning of the trail one night a few weeks ago to discover the sound
> of rustling in some bushes to be caused by a pretty good-sized
> rattlesnake -- we got within five feet before my phone-light made out
> the coiled shape just as it began to hum and buzz at us...I think
> Bando got my intensely adverse response since he allowed me to scoop
> him up and carry him back down the trail right quick, where often he
> is a muscular wriggling objector...
> 
> Bando's mouse-hunting season seemed to have mostly ended a few weeks
> back til last night we heard the tell-tale crunching of tiny bones
> through our bedroom window (he was bringing back inside several mouse
> bodies a week for quite a while there during late spring and summer,
> and he consumed them pretty much entire -- save usually for the guts
> -- munching them during the wee hours while we humans listen in the
> dark in exasperated, embarrassed, brutalized, just-woken agony (I've
> managed to save a couple that he brought in pre-kill, as well as a
> couple lizards that he also doesn't seem to want to kill and consume
> as quickly). We also have an occasional tussle around the catdoor, as
> a raccoon tries to get in, and that triggers the cat into action, and
> us into...a holding pattern of too-adrenalited helplessness at 2.am <http://2.am/>.
> or whenever...
> 
> I've been learning to drive more slowly around the bends of our little
> canyon road so I have better chances of not hitting any of the many
> deer that stumble and nimble and amble around here. I startled a
> resting one into lumbering up from a kneel the other morning out in
> the yard -- little staghorn nubs on his just-past adolescent head
> maybe ten feet away. They usually come in small families, of course,
> but occasionally as solo ramblers.
> 
> And speaking of solo ramblers, the local coyotes move around too much
> to get to know them as individuals, but, still, spotting them trotting
> along even country roads, varying from the size of a large fox to a
> large german shepherd  (three different times in the last week)
> reminds that they must be constantly nearby, even when unseen (and of
> course occasionally we hear the group howls from up in the hills
> somewhere).
> 
> The madrones' and eucalyptus' different peeling bark patterns
> (non-patterns?) never cease to fascinate, and I notice the big
> California Buckeye bulbs are coming out on the trees again (looking
> forward to the fat, long, aromatic blossom branches in the spring).
> Occasional chittering of squirrels and raucous jay or crow calls from
> a near distance. And more occasionally a solo owl hooing. Swells of
> crickets near and far we can count on every night -- the frogs have
> taken their mating calls somewhere else of late...
> 
> More than enough from me, for now. Enjoy your trip to the farther
> northeast, Margaretha!
> 
> B.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 6:00 PM,
> <empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> wrote:
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> >
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> >    1. Re: Beginning Week 1: Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic
> >       Systems and Entanglements (Randall Szott)
> >    2. short answer post :: all of -empyre-, what non-human
> >       relationships are you cultivating? (margaretha haughwout)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2017 14:18:43 +0000 (UTC)
> > From: Randall Szott <placekraft at yahoo.com <mailto:placekraft at yahoo.com>>
> > To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
> > Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Beginning Week 1: Radical Aesthetics,
> >         EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements
> > Message-ID: <402365668.3318888.1507385923606 at mail.yahoo.com <mailto:402365668.3318888.1507385923606 at mail.yahoo.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > I want to thank William and Norie for their thoughts and my fellow conversants for theirs as well. William - I read the article you suggested and it does resonate for me in many ways. One thing I will point out though, is that "sustainability" is not enough. The model of "sustainable" has been increasingly displaced in agricultural circles by "regenerative." Given the amount of damage being done in various domains (including the linguistic - thank you!), we need to do more than sustain, we must regenerate (heal, repair, improve).
> >
> > ENTANGLEMENTS:
> >
> > A last thought for the last part of the week's title. I find entanglement a powerful descriptive metaphor in describing systemic relationships, much more so than network/connection/node metaphors. However, I want to throw another term into the mix, one of a slightly larger descriptive frame - ENLIVENMENT. This concept comes from a feeling percolating for years that I couldn't quite name, it hovered near readings on pantheism, ecopsychology, and Kathleen Dean Moore's "Holdfast" or ?David Abram's "Spell of the Sensuous" among others. Finally, I stumbled across ?Andreas Weber's "Enlivenment" and the feeling had finally manifest in words, words which then coalesced into a framework that has shifted my thinking/feeling substantially. The essay is full of magic incantations - worldmaking, householding, poetic objectivity, empirical subjectivity, and the call to shift from the values of the Enlightenment (which Weber describes as an ideology of death) to Enlivenment. Briefly, he c
>  ha
> >  racterizes it this way:
> >
> > "...a new stage of cultural evolution?that can safeguard our scientific (and democratic) ideals of common access to knowledge and the powers connected with it ? while at the same time validating personal?experience that is felt and subjective: the defining essence of embodied experience.?The Enlivenment that I envision includes other animate beings, which, after all, share?the same capacities for embodied experiences and ?worldmaking.?
> >
> > Enlivenment therefore is not just another naturalist account to describe?ourselves and our world that can then automatically dictate specific policies or?economic solutions...[it is]?a naturalism that is based on the idea of?nature as an unfolding process of ever-growing freedom and creativity paradoxically?linked to material and embodied processes. The biosphere is alive in the sense that it?does not only obey the rules of deterministic or stochastic interactions of particles,?molecules, atoms, fields and waves. The biosphere is also very much about producing?agency, expression, and meaning."
> >
> > Onward, then in enlivened entanglements with each other and our nonhuman poetic collaborators!
> >
> > -r
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2017 13:41:03 -0400
> > From: margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com <mailto:margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com>>
> > To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
> > Subject: [-empyre-] short answer post :: all of -empyre-, what
> >         non-human relationships are you cultivating?
> > Message-ID:
> >         <CAP1-Q3YrMjQPOFDGzG4R4eFDG0rH8Ms_qrzcbaWA6q-ju=Ktmw at mail.gmail.com <mailto:Ktmw at mail.gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I'm driving across the northeast today, watching trees head into dormancy,
> > and thinking about the conversation that has begun this week. Lots to reply
> > to. I look forward to catching up fully this evening and tomorrow --
> >
> > In the meantime, a question for all of -empyre-::
> >
> > What relations are you cultivating with on-humans at the moment? I have
> > just moved, so my relationships are new and fragile:
> >
> > hawthorn tree at my studio
> > crabapples, apples behind my house
> > wild apples at colleagues house
> > mouse behind my oven
> > chamomile and brassicas in my greenhouse
> >
> > boneset in the trails
> > joe pye weed in the marshes
> >
> > to name a few
> >
> > --
> > beforebefore.net <http://beforebefore.net/>
> > guerrillagrafters.org <http://guerrillagrafters.org/>
> > coastalreadinggroup.com <http://coastalreadinggroup.com/>
> > --
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> > End of empyre Digest, Vol 154, Issue 4
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