ZoekresultatenZoekresultaten
Volg ons op
Volg ons op
Types
0Instelling
26Bestandstype
9Taal
5Publicatiejaar
12Thema's
14Producttype
14Publicaties met bestand / URL
2Projectstatus
3How to think from human entanglement in nonhuman life rather than from an assumption of separation and exception? How to put a non-universalizing, dehumanist ethics of knowledge into practice? How to practice a politics of knowledge in relation to nonhuman animals, built on the principle of differential continuity or kinship in difference rather than the logic of analogy that is the shared logic of anthropocentrism and other oppressive modes of thought? This paper addresses the performative politics of knowledge at work in relation to concepts of politics, performance and animality and the emergence of interspecies performance as an ethico-political practice with reference to the work of Julietta Singh, Eva Meijer, Una Chaudhuri and Black vegan scholarship.
DOCUMENT
For interspecies justice, animal welfare, and animal rights, the planet needs to be divided on the basis of species' natural resource requirements. The Half-Earth View is that to maintain viable populations of the Earth's remaining species, half of landscapes and seascapes need protection from intensive economic activity. This protection is needed outside the nature preserve system, such as in agricultural areas or cities, so nature can co-exist with local communities. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
MULTIFILE
Over the last five years, I have found myself circling around four key concepts: Performance. Philosophy. Animals. And Equality. And I have found myself thinking in and with circles. It began with the various references to circles we can find in the philosophy of Henri Bergson - in his idea of the field of attention as the distance between the two points of a compass (Bergson 2014); in his imagining of an expansive centrifugal movement that might turn a closed society into an open one (Bergson 2002); and in the role he gives to embodied practice to ‘break the circle’ of the given in which rationality or only an intellectualised notion of what counts as thought traps us (Bergson 1911). I found the circle again in the so-called ‘non-philosophy’ of Francois Laruelle (2011) – in his critique of the vicious circles and circular arguments of standard philosophies of art - including dance. But I also found the circle of anthropocentrism. I found the circle at the circus - a circle that calls upon us to consider all that goes on behind the scenes in order to produce performing animals anthropocentrically. I began to consider what role performance could play in displacing the human from the centre of values through a process of animalisation. Consider philosophy an expanding circle. Consider performance an expanding circle. The etymology of the English word centre (n.) – comes from the Latin centrum, originally the fixed point of the two points of a drafting compass, and from the Greek kentron meaning “sharp point, goad, sting of a wasp”. The centre is a middle point of a circle: the point around which something revolves. But the centre is also pointed and sharp – that which goads moving bodies in a particular direction. The goad is a traditional farming implement: a spiked stick used to spur or guide livestock; for instance, to round up cattle. The elephant goad or bullhook, is a tool employed in the training of elephants. It consists of a metal hook attached to a handle. The Greeks, we are told, used the phrase “kicking against the goad” as a proverb to teach us of the foolishness of resistance against a powerful authority: those who place themselves at the centre. The underlying ontology that informs all this work can be summed up in the words of Octavia Butler: All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. (To which we might add the footnote that truth itself changes) (Butler 1993: 3). How to think alongside dance or movement as change - understood via Bergson (amongst others) as alteration or qualitative becoming (rather than spatial transition); how to think alongside the world as movement, as change; how to dance the thought of change as a changing thought…? These are my recurring questions. The questions that keep circling back to me and through me. In this text, I will rehearse a thinking that dances the relations between performance, philosophy, animals and equality according to the figure of the circle. To think with dance and dance with thought in relation to nonhuman animals and the question of equality – understood as an ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, political and ethical question. Equality (and inequality) is a matter of how to think the fundamental nature of and relations between dance, thought, and interspecies being as our so-called ‘objects’ of enquiry. Especially within philosophies of immanence – there is an appeal to the equality of the Real, to an evenness or levelling of what is beyond hierarchized binaries between mind and body; matter and spirit; this world and some transcendent realm. Equality is a question for knowledge itself: the critique of authority and the pursuit of equality within knowledge-production; and to the hierarchies between ways of knowing. Equality is an issue for arts and more widely for aesthetic experience: who is making art for whom and from what point of view, whose aesthetic interests are taken into account and how is experience ordered to centre and give priority to some over others. Equality is linked to paying attention, to how attention is distributed and how it can be practiced in more or less exclusive and expansive ways. And of course, equality is a fundamental subject for politics and ethics. Let’s do this dance together. Step by step. Step 1: from the application of philosophy to the Real, to the emergence of philosophy from it. Step 2: from the application of philosophy to performance, to the practice of a performance philosophy. Step 3: from the judgment of animal capabilities according to human standards for what counts as ‘proper’ performance and philosophy to ‘animal performance philosophy’ as the animalization of performance and philosophy. Step 4: from the application of a universalized notion of the standard human to denigrate both human and nonhuman animals to a solidarity based on attending to the shared logic of speciesism, racism and ableism. Step 5: Towards radical equality as a performative praxis of thought. And yet, we cannot move towards equality ‘step by step’. We cannot move towards equality step by step because there can be no step-by-step guide to what it means to practice it in a given context. ‘Openness is a necessarily vague formulation that requires continual creativity to fill out its content in any one situation; one should see it as a moving position with no essence’ (Mullarkey 2012: 70). And we cannot move towards equality step by step, because it’s all or nothing. As Etienne Balibar says: Equality in fact cannot be limited. Once some X’s (“men”) are not equal, the predicate of equality can no longer be applied to anyone, for all those to whom it is supposed to be applicable are in fact “superior”, “dominant”, “privileged”, etc. Enjoyment of the equality of rights cannot spread step by step, beginning with two individuals and gradually extending to all: it must immediately concern the universality of individuals…This explains… the antinomy of equality and society for, even when it is not defined in “cultural”. “national”, or “historical” terms, a society is necessarily a society, defined by some particularity, by some exclusion, if only by a name (Balibar 2016: np). Equality will always remain exclusive if it moves step by step – expanding the circle of equality or ethical consideration to previously ostracized groups. Such a dance of thought also fails to understand the actuality of intersectional identities and interdependence. And for sure we will not reach radical equality with reasoning or intellectual exertion. As John Mullarkey suggests: ‘We can only understand equality through a performative thought, a movement or vital action rather than an intellectualist representation of it’ (Mullarkey 2012: 63). To which I might add: We do not need a philosophy of radical equality, we need to practice radical equality as a performance philosophy. Or again, the only way we can develop our understanding of radical equality is through its performative praxis. This is not going to be easy or simple. We are going to make mistakes, we are going to fall flat on our faces. Perhaps, following choreographer Amanda Piña, we should not call this a performance but a rehearsal (Piña 2017)1). So, there can be circles we want to dance as well as those we want to escape. But for the most part here our focus will be on the movements and practices that break or escape circles – whether in terms of methods that allow us to break out of the circularities of traditional philosophical analysis; or the practices that break open the circle of the “we” who are equal as always constituted through exclusion. In contrast, what we are speculatively choreographing – alongside Bergson and performance - is a movement of opening to openness (Mullarkey 2012: 69)2). In this particular rehearsal of work-in-progress thinking, my concern is with intersectional, interspecies performative praxis as a means to break out of the circularity of thought when it is reduced to a universalizing, anthropocentric and ableist intellectualism with the white, male, non-disabled subject of reason as the centre of values. My larger project is concerned with how the relationships between performance and philosophy, humans and nonhuman animals are performatively enacted and with how we can move towards what we might describe as a ‘radical equality in thought’ rather than remaining trapped in the circularity of a philosophy of performance, an anthropocentric model of performance, and a universalizing approach to animal performance philosophy. This text is in three parts.
DOCUMENT
We, Rajni and Laura, have been writing letters to each other for several years including in the context of collaboration on a large research project concerned with interspecies relations and the notion of "radical equality". For Listening across difference: letters of love/questions of radical equality we arranged a series of writing sessions where we wrote letters to each other in relation to the words 'radical', 'equality' and 'radical equality'. We wrote at the same time, but different places. We did not exchange or read each other's letters until the end. The letter-writing has enabled us to reflect on aspects of our evolving (work/life) processes which in many ways feel like the core of the "work" we have one together, but that often go unnoticed by listeners and readers within the more presentational aspects of the projects. In particular, the ways in which power structures are negotiated with care and awareness between us. The choice of the form of an exchange of letters was partly inspired by Royona Mitra and Broderick D.V. Chow's The UCLA Letters: On Dismantling Whiteness in the Academy (2019). Like them, we are interested in how the process of letter writing enables a kind of dance of thinking between the conceptual and the personal. But we listen across difference differently. As two scholars of colour, Mitra and Chow's letters present their shared and diverging perspectives on how to address the Whiteness of the UK academy. As a non-binary artist of colour and as a white cis-woman researcher, our letters try to feel their way into an intimate and honest dialogue across difference.
DOCUMENT
It happened tomorrow is an artistic research contribution, in the form of video loops on CRT monitors, to the final exhibition of the programme Climate Imaginaries at Sea. The exhibition is titled 'Unimaginable, clarion calls from rising seas' and was hosted at Bradwolff from 19 to 25 April 2024.
De Gaetano curated a special collection of more than 400 videos from the open archives of Sound & Vision, including short films, documentaries, and news reports about different forms of (other than) human relationships with water in the Netherlands. In an ongoing series of workshops called “It Happened Tomorrow/ Reflections on Water,” still images from the collection have prompted students, artists, researchers, and policymakers currently based in the Netherlands to collectively speculate on future ways of living in a country with higher waters. Through individual and collective drawing and climate fiction exercises, people were invited to look at and expand on still frames from the collection as a way to imagine possible future landscapes, adaptation scenarios, and how to co-inhabit them with other species.
These video montages explore and respond to the imaginaries generated during the participatory workshops and the narratives encountered in the audiovisual collection. Conversations from the workshops informed the textual captions on the videos, which take the form of fictional letters from an unknown researcher travelling through the Netherlands in 2124. Following Ursula Le Guin Carrier's bag theory of fiction, the audio-visual assemblages propose non-linear accounts of possible futures, open-ended and without heroes. Generative AI takes the role of co-fabulator in queering the boundary between past and future, human and more than human, giving shape to tiny climate fictions that question how we look at nature and how we can reimagine ourselves as part of it.
MULTIFILE
De bouwsector kan een belangrijke bijdrage leveren aan het overschakelen op een circulaire economie. Momenteel worden nog veel eindige grondstoffen met een hoge milieu-impact gebruikt. Dat kan anders, bijvoorbeeld door te werken met het concept van een ‘donorgebouw’ en een ‘ontvangstgebouw’. Dit werd verkend met een onderzoek door Saxion. Gepubliceerd met toestemming van de uitgever Stadswerk, 2021, nr, 7
MULTIFILE
In this paper, we share insights from our creative practice-based experimentation with ‘feral’ ways of stimulating eco-social change. Drawing on our experiences with three practice-based research projects – Open Forest, Cyano Automaton, and Open Urban Forest – we discuss how feral ways may foster more-than-human co-creation of knowledge and data, and nurture pluralistic making sense-with other-thanhuman creatures. We first explore the concept of feral in supporting the understanding of how creative eco-social inquiries may evolve beyond the bounds of anthropocentrism, in relation with more-than-human experiences. Through our three cases, we illustrate how experimenting with feralness can bring to the fore issues of power, agency, and control in the currently human-centric discourses around data, technology, and sensemaking in eco-social transformation. By sharing our emerging insights regarding feral ways, our aim is to help nurture critical, more-than-human perspectives in creative practice-based inquiries in art and design.
MULTIFILE
Samenwerking tussen retail en cultuur is van belang om de Nederlandse binnensteden leefbaar te houden, zo blijkt uit de eerste, tussentijdse observaties en conclusies van een onderzoek hiernaar. Lokaal beleid speelt daarin vanzelfsprekend een grote rol.
DOCUMENT
From an interspecies perspective, we advocate for a theoretical foundation aimed at facilitating further research towards digitally mediated human-animal interaction. The proposed framework follows an approach we call 'digitally complemented zoomorphism' and recognizes 'play' as a free and voluntary activity that is shared by both animals and humans. As a result, three initial design guidelines will emerge. Our work is pursued in order to provide animals with stimulations which stem from a closer understanding of their perceptions and are not solely designed around human subjectivity.
DOCUMENT
