[-empyre-] Eating dirt

[Lissette Olivares]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--As I opened my facebook today I saw a post from Che Gossett, whose 
trans*activism and archival research, mediated in part through their facebook 
feed is an inspiring and constant source of engagement/entanglement with the 
Black Radical tradition; they posted this last night: "there's a way in which 
animal studies reflections on animal suffering make legible and intelligible 
and empathizable the zero degree of unimaginable suffering that is never 
acknowledged or thought of when it comes to Black suffering.” 

I’d like to try to knot this to Margaretha’s question about what it means to 
make a radical eco aesthetics, with Randall’s  “radicle” (having roots) and 
Valentine’s becoming with edaphon, and her demanding question about "how we 
live in myriad relations without losing our shit.” Shit, soil, pain, trauma, 
slavery, capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, fossil fuel economy, and 
plastic in our water. Hurricane Maria and half of Puerto Rico’s population (at 
least 1.5 million people) without water, even if it does have plastic in it. 
Trees ripped out of the soil, a beach named after dead dogs where all the 
rescued satos died, and a nearby Monkey island where Macaques survived. 
Incommensurate pains, incommensurate traumas, a struggle to translate disparate 
affects across a myriad of diversity in bodies and places and times in a myriad 
of ways that makes it impossible not to lose your shit. I try to remember that 
this is not just now. I try to remember that we are not in a teleological 
movement towards an end, that the past and the present and the future collide 
and entangle and knot together, and I remember reading about Cortázar and his 
men and how surprised they were when upon making contact with the multitudes of 
deer in Abya Yala they thought them to be stupid because they did not flee, for 
the deer had not yet learned to fear Man; Man who is different than the 
indigenous societies who lived with and ate the flesh of these creatures, for 
Man, the Man of rational Enlightenment thought, the Man identified by Sylvia 
Wynter, Man whose superiority would wage a war of contagion, whose extractive 
logic would prey upon the land, upon the radicle, upon the ephedra and its 
creatures, creatures who are different than humans, creatures who are not the 
same as the anthropos. And I receive a flash from an indio, from a healer whose 
videos my partner watches on youtube, who teaches viewers to eat dirt from 
different sites to stay healthy, just a little sprinkle of dirt in my mouth for 
my micro biome, and for my ancestors, for the eight to twelve souls that Mohan 
Rai explained were there in my body, not one, not two, eight to twelve, but 
sometimes one or two get lost, and you feel it, you feel sick, and you have to 
call them back. He and Parvati Rai and Donaxing showed me how. Did you know 
there are tecnological sensors that find mass graves in the dirt, they can map 
bodies in the earth with light and translate it into color? Will a device one 
day claim to map the unimaginable pain, of and in Black, that Che brings from 
the universe and onto my computer? I hope I will be able to grind it with a 
mortar and pestle, I hope I will be able to place it under my tongue, I hope 
that it will download to that code that we have not yet discovered, that most 
of us mistakenly call DNA, that we believe we carry somewhere in our shell or 
our bone, to transmit for the next generation, for those who survive, for the 
Macaques and the others who will know how to weather the storm.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/09/half_of_puerto_rico_doesn_t_have_clean_drinking_water.html
 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-fibres-found-tap-water-around-world-study-reveals
 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4931174/No-dogs-Puerto-Rico-s-Dead-Dog-Beach-survived-storm.html
 

http://discovermagazine.com/2015/oct/14-body-of-evidence 

> On Oct 4, 2017, at 8:31 AM, margaretha haughwout 
>  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi all,
> 
> I am posting this for Randall, while we try and sort why his emails aren't 
> coming through:
> 
> 
> Hello all. I am looking forward to speaking with, and alongside, everyone. I 
> hope to think a bit about each of the separate concepts in this week's title: 
> Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements. This message will 
> focus on the first concept with the other 

Re: [-empyre-] From Randall

[Norie Neumark]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all,
This month is so rich and exciting, I’m not sure where to begin. Randall’s post 
is so fruitful in so many ways — terroirism is such a wonderful concept and 
important for freeing us from neoliberalism art-making.  The emphasis on the 
local, the soil, feeling obligations to the earth resonated with a work that 
Maria Miranda and i are doing with our worms — Waiting. We came to it both from 
the joy of having a back yard and compost bins (after years of living in 
appartments) and thinking about how, as artists, to work with animals in ways 
that could be a collaboration rather than instrumental use. We were delighted, 
too, that our worms love the same things as us — lots of vegetables and (too 
much) coffee. What we found that was really interesting, too, was that when 
when we set up a new worm cafe  we had to attune to their rhythms — they 
couldn’t be rushed, we just had to wait til they were ready to come out from 
under the blanket and start working their way through our food. Composting 
(yes, Donna Haraway), co-composing (yes Erin Manning), attuning (yes Vinciance 
Despret), waiting (yes, WORMS!) We’ve been thinking about the work as it goes 
along in our blog https://workingworms.net/  
Really looking forward to the rest of this month… such rich soil for thinking 
and for work
Norie Neumark

www.out-of-sync.com


> On 4 Oct 2017, at 11:31 pm, margaretha haughwout 
>  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi all,
> 
> I am posting this for Randall, while we try and sort why his emails aren't 
> coming through:
> 
> 
> Hello all. I am looking forward to speaking with, and alongside, everyone. I 
> hope to think a bit about each of the separate concepts in this week's title: 
> Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements. This message will 
> focus on the first concept with the other concepts to follow unless the 
> conversation takes us elsewhere!
> 
> 
> RADICAL AESTHETICS: 
> Radical is not a word I have much to do with, except in its Latinate origin 
> (having roots). So, I take it quite literally when asked to think about 
> radical aesthetics. But it might better capture my sense of things to say 
> "radicle aesthetics." In contemporary art, what passes for "radical" is too 
> often built on sand, not soil and thus is not amenable to truly radical 
> (radicle) life. 
> 
> In introducing me, Margaretha mentioned another particular word usage that I 
> have found useful - terroir. That is a term many of you may recognize from 
> wine making, which refers to the total environmental influence on multiple 
> facets of a wine's characteristics. I take up the term as a political stance, 
> as a terroirist. In the Capitalocene, I would argue that to embrace locality 
> and to reject the cosmopolitan art system (or the broader global habitus for 
> meaning making) makes one subject to accusations that make such a term 
> resonate with its obvious (near) homophone. I would further argue that just 
> as we live in specific watersheds, and foodsheds, we also live in specific 
> noösheds. This fact, necessitates a radicle (radical) re-thinking of 
> aesthetics.
> 
> Thus, Liberalism’s (or "art making wholly tied to neoliberalism" as mentioned 
> in the intro) obsession with institutionalizing, economizing, and 
> professionalizing every sphere of human endeavor leaves us out of love’s 
> reach. We need human scale, affectionate practices that generate enchantment, 
> and numinous experience.The liberal project is a dead end (or Entzauberung).
> 
> Ronald Osborn (quoting Wendell Berry):
> “Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more 
> than to **understand** their obligation to one another and the earth; they 
> need also the **feeling** of such obligation, and the feeling can come only 
> within the patterns of familiarity.”
> 
> The affection and skill necessary to prevent the depletion of top-soil, for 
> example, only arises through intimate knowledge of and devotion to a concrete 
> locality and its supporting natural and human relationships. There simply are 
> no technical or global solutions to the crisis of soil loss brought on by 
> extractive chemical and machine-based farming methods. What are needed are 
> cultural solutions that take diverse local forms and emerge as a deeply 
> rooted and affectionate responsiveness to place.
> 
> “When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working 
> in and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then 
> destruction inevitably results,” Berry writes. “An adequate local culture, 
> among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.”
> 
> Attempts at definition:
> 
> noöshed - an area of land in which ideas are formed and (eventually) collect 
> into larger flows of ideas forming yet larger noösheds. 

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

[margaretha haughwout]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello all, and thank you Lisette and Valentine for diving into how
different bodies encounter the violence and terror of our times

Thinking about the dead and the ground -- how the dead feed the soil. And
how the ground, as David Abram points out, is the past that we stand on.

So it make sense that this is also where we locate our grief.

I'm wondering if more can be said about the role of grief in this work, and
perhaps it's ties to rehabilitation, recuperation? I connect the work of
grief to Deborah Bird Rose's thoughts of recuperative work, to her, acts of
recuperation are humble, open, incomplete, recognizing that there is no
whole to return to.

A small set of thoughts amidst a busy day --

-M







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beforebefore.net
guerrillagrafters.org
coastalreadinggroup.com
--



On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 10:23 PM, Valentine Cadieux <
kirsten.valent...@gmail.com> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thank you, Lisette, Margaretha, and those joining,
>
> I’m trying to figure out what would make the word terroirism fit in my
> mouth. Especially on a day (in addition to the racoons) when people on the
> land where I live are waking up ruminating about what causes a wealthy
> white man who sends big tins of cookies to his mother to engage in mass
> shootings with automatic weapons, the associations with territorial terror
> complicate my morning’s intent to make cookies for my own godmother, and
> seem to demand an accounting of how we live in myriad relations without
> losing our shit.
>
> So for the moment, as a way to start into that question via the aesthetics
> of ecological practice, let me articulate what I love about /becoming with/
> the edaphon, why keeping our shit together seems valuable and accountable
> to that body of organisms, and why these still make me uncomfortable,
> productively, about terroirism.
>
> As a geographer, I often reflect on how decentering humans in our
> regenerative exploratory practices often starts by recognizing the
> disproportionate importance of local relationships in our awareness,
> especially relationships we have to imagine. My soil relationships are not
> just where I live. In fact, the vast majority of them are mediated through
> circuits of capital — with ecoaesthetic implications that make us crazy,
> both ethically and, as we understand more and more about our
> neurodependencies on the microbiome, literally.
>
> So while it may be relatively possible to recognize that a handful — a
> spoonful, as people often say, despite not often spooning soil — of earth
> enrolls me in more relationships than with all the other people on earth,
> I’m not sure I know how to practice relating to the communities of more
> distant soil, beyond general decolonizing, anti-oppressive, and
> accountability strategies. Figuring out how not to spread my shit beyond
> where I can possibly be responsible to the relations it creates is one
> thing; imagining that it is possible to be held in so many relations maybe
> provides a supportive start for feeling supported by entanglements, and
> able to wholeheartedly engage terroir without fundamentalism, defensive
> localism, or possessiveness.
>
> Making peace,
> Valentine
>
> On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Lissette Olivares <
> lioliva...@fulbrightmail.org> wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> 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 

[-empyre-] From Randall

[margaretha haughwout]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all,

I am posting this for Randall, while we try and sort why his emails aren't
coming through:


Hello all. I am looking forward to speaking with, and alongside, everyone.
I hope to think a bit about each of the separate concepts in this week's
title: Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements. This
message will focus on the first concept with the other concepts to follow
unless the conversation takes us elsewhere!


RADICAL AESTHETICS:
Radical is not a word I have much to do with, except in its Latinate origin
(having roots). So, I take it quite literally when asked to think about
radical aesthetics. But it might better capture my sense of things to say
"radicle aesthetics." In contemporary art, what passes for "radical" is too
often built on sand, not soil and thus is not amenable to truly radical
(radicle) life.

In introducing me, Margaretha mentioned another particular word usage that
I have found useful - terroir. That is a term many of you may recognize
from wine making, which refers to the total environmental influence on
multiple facets of a wine's characteristics. I take up the term as a
political stance, as a terroirist. In the Capitalocene, I would argue that
to embrace locality and to reject the cosmopolitan art system (or the
broader global habitus for meaning making) makes one subject to accusations
that make such a term resonate with its obvious (near) homophone. I would
further argue that just as we live in specific watersheds, and foodsheds,
we also live in specific noösheds. This fact, necessitates a radicle
(radical) re-thinking of aesthetics.

Thus, Liberalism’s (or "art making wholly tied to neoliberalism" as
mentioned in the intro) obsession with institutionalizing, economizing, and
professionalizing every sphere of human endeavor leaves us out of love’s
reach. We need human scale, affectionate practices that generate
enchantment, and numinous experience.The liberal project is a dead end (or
Entzauberung).

Ronald Osborn (quoting Wendell Berry):
“Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need
more than to **understand** their obligation to one another and the earth;
they need also the **feeling** of such obligation, and the feeling can come
only within the patterns of familiarity.”

The affection and skill necessary to prevent the depletion of top-soil, for
example, only arises through intimate knowledge of and devotion to a
concrete locality and its supporting natural and human relationships. There
simply are no technical or global solutions to the crisis of soil loss
brought on by extractive chemical and machine-based farming methods. What
are needed are cultural solutions that take diverse local forms and emerge
as a deeply rooted and affectionate responsiveness to place.

“When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working
in and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then
destruction inevitably results,” Berry writes. “An adequate local culture,
among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.”

Attempts at definition:

noöshed - an area of land in which ideas are formed and (eventually)
collect into larger flows of ideas forming yet larger noösheds.

terroirist - proponent and defender of one's noöshed, but also an advocate
for reinhabitation of one's place, resisting globalization.

- Randall


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