Skills for Commoners | Gene Ray
Commoning is the doing-together that composes commoners and shareable goods into a commons. Doing-together is kin to sympoiesis (making-together) and symbiosis (living-together). Commoning builds shared worlds, as well as shared goods.
A 500-year project known as capitalist modernity has been busy destroying worlds, enclosing the earth in a globe, and constructing an “automatic subject. . . . an inspirited monster” (Marx) that tirelessly turns living and nonliving beings into toxins called commodities.
Commoning is a mode of de-commodifying, of detoxing. Can it be more? Can it become more-than-human, extending the doing-together in multispecies co-production and re-worlding (Haraway, Tsing)? Can it become a project of biospheric reparation and resurgence, of “survivance” (Vizenor) and “commonisation” (De Angelis)?
In this seminar we will share skills, each of us taking turns teaching and all of us learning. We’ll show ourselves how easy it is to compose a simple commons. What do we know how to do or make? What do we need to know how to do, what would be useful and helpful for “livability” in the capitalist ruins (Tsing)? Please consider the wealth of your experience and bring a simple skill to teach us. A remedy, a recipe, a repair or hack or. . .
Readings/ Screening:
Commoning is the doing-together that composes commoners and shareable goods into a commons. Doing-together is kin to sympoiesis (making-together) and symbiosis (living-together). Commoning builds shared worlds, as well as shared goods.
A 500-year project known as capitalist modernity has been busy destroying worlds, enclosing the earth in a globe, and constructing an “automatic subject. . . . an inspirited monster” (Marx) that tirelessly turns living and nonliving beings into toxins called commodities.
Commoning is a mode of de-commodifying, of detoxing. Can it be more? Can it become more-than-human, extending the doing-together in multispecies co-production and re-worlding (Haraway, Tsing)? Can it become a project of biospheric reparation and resurgence, of “survivance” (Vizenor) and “commonisation” (De Angelis)?
In this seminar we will share skills, each of us taking turns teaching and all of us learning. We’ll show ourselves how easy it is to compose a simple commons. What do we know how to do or make? What do we need to know how to do, what would be useful and helpful for “livability” in the capitalist ruins (Tsing)? Please consider the wealth of your experience and bring a simple skill to teach us. A remedy, a recipe, a repair or hack or. . .
Readings/ Screening:
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), chapter 13, “Resurgence,” pp. 179-190; and “latent commons,” pp. 254-255.
- Gene Ray, “Surviving the Global: An Introduction to the Planetary”
- The Mushroom Speaks – A Film by Marion Neumann (2021)
Eating earth: Experiments in Finitude | Olga Cielemęcka
In an environmentally traumatized world, the labour of repairing and healing comes as an exercise in finitude – of “living in the world of wounds” (Leopold, Sandilands). In a deforested area, new vegetation overgrows the wounds left by extractive logging but does not erase them. Lizards can regrow a compromised tail but can’t replace it by a perfect copy of how it was before. A healed wound leaves a scar; some scars thicken with time. These are exercises in re-membering (Barad), mending, and repairing, where the ‘healing process does not raise life to a form of completion’ (Malabou). Healing and repair are trauma and damage. In the seminar we will share our experiences of reading Eartheater/Cometierra, a story of systemic violence materially inscribed in the ecology of a place—of violence deposited in the soil. We will gather to think together how matter remembers and resists, and to imagine political ecologies of healing.
Reading:
Dolores Reyes. Cometierra. 2019. (English translation: Eartheater. Translated by Julia Sanches. 2020.)
In an environmentally traumatized world, the labour of repairing and healing comes as an exercise in finitude – of “living in the world of wounds” (Leopold, Sandilands). In a deforested area, new vegetation overgrows the wounds left by extractive logging but does not erase them. Lizards can regrow a compromised tail but can’t replace it by a perfect copy of how it was before. A healed wound leaves a scar; some scars thicken with time. These are exercises in re-membering (Barad), mending, and repairing, where the ‘healing process does not raise life to a form of completion’ (Malabou). Healing and repair are trauma and damage. In the seminar we will share our experiences of reading Eartheater/Cometierra, a story of systemic violence materially inscribed in the ecology of a place—of violence deposited in the soil. We will gather to think together how matter remembers and resists, and to imagine political ecologies of healing.
Reading:
Dolores Reyes. Cometierra. 2019. (English translation: Eartheater. Translated by Julia Sanches. 2020.)
To Eat Alone is to Die Alone* | Vivien Sansour
Oftentimes when Palestinian farmers put seeds in the ground, they mutter a quiet prayer, “may we eat and may we feed others”. This and many other linguistically profound sayings provide a lens into a cultural design based on the idea that our survival as individuals is connected to the well-being and survival of our community.
In this time together, we will be invited to let go of our commitments to and preconceptions with “reality” in order to allow ourselves to imagine alternative universes that are inspired by nature and her daring imagination. From the real to the fantastical, we will engage in a hybrid and intimate activity of being physically present with other living beings, while channeling this co-presence into a writing activity that will bring us deeper clarities about who we have been, who we are, and whom we would like to be.
This workshop will take us through a short but profound trip into our own spirits, the spirits of other people, and the seeds that help us weave stories to navigate a world that is in a state of hospice. For instance, how did imagination, nature, and science come together to make it possible for humans to develop bread from a wild grass, and how might this relationship of co-creation between humans and other beings inform our future? These questions call for urgent contemplation, because many of the things we love are dying or are already gone. We will have to learn how to grieve, and even how to die, together, in order to rebirth a new world in which we become “better designers”, together.
* A Palestinian proverb
Readings:
Sansour, Vivien. 2022. “Hanan and the People of the Soil”. e- flux #128.
Sansour, Vivien. 2021. “The Unseen As Fertile Ground for New Wisdom”. MOLD Magazine #5.
Sansour, Vivien. 2021. "Palatal Geographies". Chicago Architectural Biennial.
Sansour, Vivien. 2014. “A Thirsty Generation”. IMEU (Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding).
Oftentimes when Palestinian farmers put seeds in the ground, they mutter a quiet prayer, “may we eat and may we feed others”. This and many other linguistically profound sayings provide a lens into a cultural design based on the idea that our survival as individuals is connected to the well-being and survival of our community.
In this time together, we will be invited to let go of our commitments to and preconceptions with “reality” in order to allow ourselves to imagine alternative universes that are inspired by nature and her daring imagination. From the real to the fantastical, we will engage in a hybrid and intimate activity of being physically present with other living beings, while channeling this co-presence into a writing activity that will bring us deeper clarities about who we have been, who we are, and whom we would like to be.
This workshop will take us through a short but profound trip into our own spirits, the spirits of other people, and the seeds that help us weave stories to navigate a world that is in a state of hospice. For instance, how did imagination, nature, and science come together to make it possible for humans to develop bread from a wild grass, and how might this relationship of co-creation between humans and other beings inform our future? These questions call for urgent contemplation, because many of the things we love are dying or are already gone. We will have to learn how to grieve, and even how to die, together, in order to rebirth a new world in which we become “better designers”, together.
* A Palestinian proverb
Readings:
Sansour, Vivien. 2022. “Hanan and the People of the Soil”. e- flux #128.
Sansour, Vivien. 2021. “The Unseen As Fertile Ground for New Wisdom”. MOLD Magazine #5.
Sansour, Vivien. 2021. "Palatal Geographies". Chicago Architectural Biennial.
Sansour, Vivien. 2014. “A Thirsty Generation”. IMEU (Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding).
Undercartographies | Tom Western
Far from the cartographic practices that mark resources for extraction and people for dispossession, we make worlds out of relation – to the places and things we live with and hold dear, and to each other. This session initiates a collaborative art-research exercise; an experiment in developing collective spatial imaginations; a map that folds and unfolds over the course of the summer lab.
We make undercartographies: maps that are invented and inscribed from below, that write spaces into existence, that support free movement, that bring all beings together. Starting from our gathering point at Pelion, we carry and combine knowledges and ecologies, mapping ourselves into the mountain and the mountain into ourselves. These aren’t maps in any conventional sense, but are rather a form of geopoetics – of reorganising the world. Sound and story, poem and dance, colour and texture, rhythm and emotion. ‘Maps’, as geographer Nour Joudah puts it, ‘can confine and erase peoples and places, but they can also free a vision. Spatial imagination provides opportunities that policy debates do not’ (2023).
Inspired by a set of geopoetic practices – Etel Adnan’s leporellos, Natalie Diaz’s water poems, Predrag Matvejevic’s cultural landscapes, Mona Kareem’s exile mappings, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s rehearsals for living – we make methods and forms of space-writing that create worlds from below.
Reading:
Maynard, Robyn and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2022. Rehearsals for Living. Chicago: Haymarket Books (part 1, ‘On Letter Writing, Commune, and the End of (This) World’, pp.5-53).
Other things cited:
Adnan, Etel. 2020. Leporellos. Paris: Galerie Lelong & Co.
Diaz, Natalie. 2020. Postcolonial Love Poem. London: Faber & Faber (especially ‘exhibits from The American Water Museum’, pp.67-77).
Joudah, Nour. 2023. ‘Topography of Gaza: Contouring Indigenous Urbanism’. Jadaliyya, May 15.
Kareem, Mona. 2023. I Will Not Fold These Maps, trans. Sara Elkamel. London: Poetry Translation Centre.
Matvejevic, Predrag. 1999. Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, trans. Michael Henry Heim. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Self-indulgent thing to listen to if you’ve got the time:
The Syrian and Greek Youth Forum. 2023. ‘Asyrmatos | Mediterradio’.
Far from the cartographic practices that mark resources for extraction and people for dispossession, we make worlds out of relation – to the places and things we live with and hold dear, and to each other. This session initiates a collaborative art-research exercise; an experiment in developing collective spatial imaginations; a map that folds and unfolds over the course of the summer lab.
We make undercartographies: maps that are invented and inscribed from below, that write spaces into existence, that support free movement, that bring all beings together. Starting from our gathering point at Pelion, we carry and combine knowledges and ecologies, mapping ourselves into the mountain and the mountain into ourselves. These aren’t maps in any conventional sense, but are rather a form of geopoetics – of reorganising the world. Sound and story, poem and dance, colour and texture, rhythm and emotion. ‘Maps’, as geographer Nour Joudah puts it, ‘can confine and erase peoples and places, but they can also free a vision. Spatial imagination provides opportunities that policy debates do not’ (2023).
Inspired by a set of geopoetic practices – Etel Adnan’s leporellos, Natalie Diaz’s water poems, Predrag Matvejevic’s cultural landscapes, Mona Kareem’s exile mappings, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s rehearsals for living – we make methods and forms of space-writing that create worlds from below.
Reading:
Maynard, Robyn and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2022. Rehearsals for Living. Chicago: Haymarket Books (part 1, ‘On Letter Writing, Commune, and the End of (This) World’, pp.5-53).
Other things cited:
Adnan, Etel. 2020. Leporellos. Paris: Galerie Lelong & Co.
Diaz, Natalie. 2020. Postcolonial Love Poem. London: Faber & Faber (especially ‘exhibits from The American Water Museum’, pp.67-77).
Joudah, Nour. 2023. ‘Topography of Gaza: Contouring Indigenous Urbanism’. Jadaliyya, May 15.
Kareem, Mona. 2023. I Will Not Fold These Maps, trans. Sara Elkamel. London: Poetry Translation Centre.
Matvejevic, Predrag. 1999. Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, trans. Michael Henry Heim. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Self-indulgent thing to listen to if you’ve got the time:
The Syrian and Greek Youth Forum. 2023. ‘Asyrmatos | Mediterradio’.
