CRITICAL TIMES. Part II: Ecologies of Relation

Part I: Multiple Matter. It took place in Berlin on November 17-18, 2023 and explored temporality in relation to active matter and the Anthropocene thesis resonating through urban settings, activist-arts interventions and scarce materials. The upcoming workshop will follow the same format as the first part with four inputs by invited contributors but will also include a third day to collectively reflect and envision potential forms and formats for continuation.

The workshop CRITICAL TIMES. Part II: Ecologies of Relation takes place from April 11-13, 2024 at “Buitenplaats Brienenoord” in Rotterdam. We envision formats that are unconventional, playful and non-hierarchical and hopefully undermine classic forms of representation and knowledge consumption. We ask our invited contributors to facilitate experimental situations in order to take time and practice together. Accordingly, the event will unfold into four sessions of approximately four hours and includes the sharing of food, moments of rest and hopefully deep engagement and laughter.

Schedule
 

Thursday, April 11, Buitenplaats Brinenoord

9:15 Departure from Centrum with Water-Taxi 
10:00 - 13:00 Lara Almacegui - SAND. How much is carried in a day? A visit to a concrete plant

To think about geology, material, construction and city development, a concrete plant near the workshop site in Brienenoord island will be visited.

In the Netherlands, every day, hundreds of vessels carry sand for construction, ground works and space transformation. At present, sand is more often dredged in the lakes and the North see than at the river plaine. A calculation realised with help of the Geological National Survey estimated the amount of sand that has been removed and displaced in the Netherlands: 8000 million tons. ('Ophoogzand' and 'suppletiezand')

After being carried and deposited by the rivers, between 9000 years and 65 million years ago, sand gets removed by the contractors, it is carried to the treatment plants and building sites where it becomes the necessary construction material. During the workshop visit to the concrete plant, sand can be seen just before it continues its way into the building industry. The visit to the plant is an opportunity to observe a site and a material evoking the geological origin of construction.

Reflecting on extraction for the production of space, the raw material installations by Lara Almarcegui underline the relation between the constructed, the city, who owns its geology and the ground where it is settled. In Basel, to highlight the large volumes involved and the materiality of the built environment, Almarcegui made piles of the gravel extracted each day by a quarry in the city, 1000 tons. (project commissioned by Creative Time, Messe Basel, 2018). Inventories of construction materials were carried out to analyse the origins of the built environment: Sâo Paolo is built out of 446 million tons of concrete (Sâo Paulo Biennial 2006). M+ in Hong Kong, one of the most recent major museum projects, is made of 168,938 tons of gravel. Sand in the Netherlands, (2021) is a calculation of the sand that lies underneath the country identifying the sand by origin – maritime, glacial, and the different rivers. The project relates to how the country was formed, and how rivers carried sand and deposited it underneath 40 million years ago. It also, relates to the present and the future since sand is being extracted on a large quantity right now.

Biography

The works that Lara Almarcegui has been developing over the course of nearly twenty years are situated at the border between urban renewal and urban decay, and make visible what tends to escape general notice. On the one hand, Almarcegui focuses her attention on abandoned spaces and structures in the process of transformation; on the other, she investigates the different connections that can be established between architecture and the urban order. The work of Lara Almarcegui poses questions about the current state of the construction, development, use, and decay of spaces that are apparently peripheral to the city. In her large- scale projects she provokes a dialogue between the different elements that make up the physical reality of the urban landscape, in its constant transformation through demolitions, excavations, construction materials, and contemporary ruins.

13:00 – 14:30  Lunch 
14:30 – 16:30 Katherine G. Sammler (University of Twente, NL) – presentation and discussion

Habitats and habitants: Towards a politics of bodies, relations, & waste

Examining the feat of maintaining life in orbit draws a sharp focus to the ecological and engineered relationship between bodies and environments, the porous and circulatory matter that blurs any boundaries between habitat and habitant. These intimate, engineered spaces evoke a microcosm of urgent planetary concerns surrounding air and water resources, and waste capture, storage, and elimination. Amidst various private and public space programs’ stated goals, both national agencies and entrepreneurs have been planning for more intensive offplanet operations, often part of apocalyptic narratives of a perceived planetary obsolescence. Such formulations of the planet and space in relation to waste, wasting, and humankind contain within them colonial spatiotemporalities of abandonment, discard, and escape. This paper explores NASA’s management of biological operations and discharge wastes in low gravity environments. Without strong gravitational fields, liquids coalesce at the location they are created, instead of flowing down and away. Such excesses disrupt the orderly engineered environments and minutely monitored bodies of these techno-scientific endeavors. Analyzing astronaut tears, space gynecology, zero-g surgery, and NASA’s “Space Poop Challenge” through feminist queer and disability theory, new materialist, and discard studies lenses, this paper seeks to refigure the deeply entangled relationships between fleshy bodies and planetary bodies, biomass and geomass, and prompt new discussions of gravity politics.

Biography

Katherine G. (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Environmental Knowledge, Technology, and Sustainability. They are a political and human geographer with a background in physics and atmospheric sciences. Research interests involve knowledge production in physical and biological sciences as well as how scientific categories are employed in political projects. Katherine has a specific focus on oceanic and coastal spaces and resources. All of their work includes environmental justice perspectives - considering diverse practices, anti-colonial critiques, feminist and queer theory and methods, and critical science and technology studies. Recent publications are "The rising politics of sea level: demarcating territory in a vertically relative world", in Territory, Politics, Governance (2020) and "Unblackboxing mediation in the digital mine", in Geoforum (2023).

16:30 – 17:30 Island Tour with Maurice Specht from Buitenplaats Brienenoord
18:00 – 20:00 Dinner
 

Friday, April 12, Buitenplaats Brinenoord

10:00 -13:00 Femke Snelting & Martino Morandi (Constant in Brussels / BE)

"Incon­ve­nience is another way of pointing to the experience of nonsovereign relationality. It does not always produce a sense of injury but does always signify the pressure of what to do with coexistence." (On the inconvenience of other people, Lauren Berlant)

Following Berlant's prompt, this input combines an exploration of the world of hardware virtualization with a hands-on session of disobedient diagramming, asking how infrastructures are made while we move with them. Virtualization is the computational technology which underpins the infrastructure of the Cloud. With its technological base, time-sharing, it allows the parallel use of computational resources by acting at the temporal scale of computer micro-processors. Software emulation divides hardware resources into multiple digitally separated environments which can then be provided as a service. In turn, this allows for the efficientist organization of computation and labour that finds in the Cloud its current paradigm. It has become increasingly clear that virtualization and time-sharing are not just technical paradigms, but social and relational ones. We are wondering then how the current dependency on Cloud infrastructures and their particular approach to time-management affects our ability to experience nonsovereign relationality.

We propose to approach these questions together with the help of Tardigraph, a script to generate live editable Graphviz diagrams in a browser. It is motivated by a fascination for how the real-time collective drawing/writing of diagrams both influences and is in friction with common understandings of relations as kinship. Tardigraph invites us to playfully resist the way these relations are translated into the network imaginaries of AT&T and instead consider how things might not be 'the same as', but rather 'not alike', or 'sort of like' something else.

Biographies

Martino Morandi works at the intersections between art, technology and politics. His interests and projects revolve around the material conditions of technologies and their genealogies, using non-hegemonic paradigms like conviviality, semi-efficiency, dysfunctioning. He graduated in Graphic Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (BA, 2011). He collaborates with LAG in Amsterdam and Constant VZW in Brussels.

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels (since 2003). Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research to interrogate the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of  bodies in the context of volumetric technologies. With the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha), she studies the computational imaginations of rock formations. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen, a foundation for multi-visual research, with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels).

13:00 -14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 17:00 Clara Balaguer (Manila/Utrecht, PH/NL) and Vishnu Vardhani Rajan (Helsinki / FI) 

Rosebush Syndrome (There Can Only Be One)

Parting from the canonical Master Suppression Techniques—a collection of five tactics predominantly used by men to undermine women in the workplace—Vishnu Vardhani Rajan and Clara Balaguer present an in-progress analysis of alter-suppression techniques encountered in “feminist” or “radical” or “safe” or “decolonial” spaces, each through their own lens of experience and vocabulary.  

This is a proposition to name, define, and self-reflect on the existence of alter-suppression techniques—forms of internalized oppression that exist inside marginalized or otherwise underserved communities, perpetrated by the oppressed amongst each other. While recognizing that power systems have systematically and historically privileged white, cis, male, Anglo-European, class-fortunate, or high caste bodies, an intersectional approach must reckon with what is a discomforting thought: liberation from traditional masters includes the possibility of becoming our own oppressors, using not just the master's tools but new ones of our own ingenuity. 

These tactics are not one-dimensional. They are not to be confused with trauma re-enactment, though this may sometimes be unavoidably entangled. Often born as self-defense, these tactics can–under the right conditions–morph into forms of internal oppression for defending fragile, only-just-won visibilities. Conversations about them (especially in public space) must invite nuance, stomach doubt, and cultivate self-awareness. Just as privilege anoints no gods, alterity makes no saints.

Biographies

Vishnu Vardhani Rajan is a body-philosopher. A hyphenated identity and building  connections between art, witchcraft, alternative histories, punk orientalism, Marxism, and Naxalism define them. Sleep, conflict, nutrition, gaze, and surveillance are research interests in their philosophy. Night politics, conflict-positivity, and food are recurring themes in their work, which spans multi-disciplinary practices such as performance arts, masc-drag, stand-up comedy, film-making, quilting, and spoken word poetry. Infinite Playlist Afterisms and Convivial Complaint Cell are their current, long-term, non-performance performance works. 

Clara Balaguer is a cultural worker, curriculum builder, and grey literature circulator. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases, the latest of which is To Be Determined: a loosely organized structure of sleeper cells that activate or deactivate in response to external factors—abundance to be distributed, urgencies to be addressed, or leisure to be. Currently, she curates the Civic Praxis program at BAK, basis for actuele kunst (Utrecht) and teaches Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam). 

18:00 till late Dinner, Performance/Concert, Sauna (facilitated by Buitenplaats Brienenoord)

Saturday, April 13, RASL Studio (Hillevliet 90, 3074 KD Rotterdam)

10:00 – 12:00 Possible inputs by participant and reflection on the prior two days.
12:00 – 13:00  Lunch
13:00 – 15:00 Conversation on continuation, publication projects, goodbye