Naturecultures: MORE-THAN-HUMAN Beatrice ZAIDENBERG (LIMB) / Ally BISSHOP / Annee MIRON / Theun KARELSE Moderator: Anett HOLZHEID

Splintered Realities Art Science festival 2022 RIXC GALLERY Riga https://festival2022.rixc.org/

Beatrice ZAIDENBERG (LIMB). Hydrograhism – hydroecology as speculative writing

The artist collective LIMB is a child of the pandemic. During the apex of videoconference and online collaborative whiteboards, Sam Kaufman, Margot Minnot-Thomas, Beatrice Zaidenberg and Juliette Pépin became eager to replenish their minds with challenging perspectives outside of their comfort zone and at the same time distance themselves from 2020 anxiety-driven uncertainties. LIMB’s research and artistic practice are rooted in each member’s ongoing endeavour to counteract western obsessions in fixing nonhuman bodies. Fixations can consist of sealing/enprisoning non-humans in aseptic vitrines for an indefinite time or through enclosing taxonomic classification which speaks the language of abjection. The fruitful diversions of LIMB’s discussions, frustrations, and friendship are visualised in their still-growing thinking map. As each of LIMB’s members started to build an island made of visual and linguistic points of departure, the work slowly grew into a map where navigating is only possible by constantly changing scales and perspectives. Once the sanitary situation allowed it, the collective decided to take those entangled syllables and collages into a physical exhibition which took place at the CCA Brighton in November 2021 And so, Hydrographic was born. The exhibition was a collaborative effort of forming and drafting, rewriting, and erasing forms of (nonhuman) agency. Ultimately, the curatorial practice was rooted in a visual and bodily heterarchical network of knowledge transfer. Hydrographism is an outstanding example of how digital tools can start to work as sensitive surfaces, as inscribing agencies, and as archives. In the exhibition, each member’s individual contribution to the collective growing body of connections was represented by a physical vitrine. Visitors were invited to leave, bring and take objects that responded to the exhibition’s themes and public program. In this way, anyone could contribute to a living archive feeding into new eco-poetic methods of more-than-human kinship.

LIMB is a collective of artists, writers, researchers and curators based between the UK, France, and Germany. Through collaborative projects and individual practices, they share a pluridisciplinary approach and think through entangled issues surrounding ecologies, interspecies communication, nonhuman life-worlds, aesthetics and language. Research-as-practice and practice-as-research lie at the heart of their work, and they continually engage in direct and indirect co-creations with webs of nonhuman interdependence.

Network: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_l9sO-dQ=/?share_link_id=429690487362 Brighton CCA exhibition: https://brightoncca.art/event/hydrographism

Ally BISSHOP. Mythopoesis, speculation, divination, vibration: artistic methods for human-spider communication. This paper explores some affective, mythopoetic and speculative possibilities for interspecies communication with invertebrate animals via artistic mediations of encounters with web-building spiders. Specifically, it examines speculative forays into human-spider communication extending from artist Tomás Saraceno’s interdisciplinary Arachnophilia research: the spider jam sessions or human-spider concerts, and the arachnomancy or spider divination project. Spiders are abject figures of nonhuman otherness that index a relation to alterity; their queer behaviours, morphologies and sensorium underscore a seemingly impassable species and ontological divide – challenging the possibility of human-spider relation, let alone communication. This paper traces how sensory and affective attunements across thresholds of difference offer alternative frameworks for imagining ‘communication’ with creatures like spiders (and other invertebrates) with whom we do not share language, scales, temporalities, sensory capacities. To think with, communicate with, invertebrate animals is a necessarily speculative endeavour. In investigating Saraceno’s speculative human-spider mediations, this paper traces their mythopoetic dimensions—how these experiments enrol worlding praxes that move between art, science and fabulation to offer propositions for thinking interspecies communication. Analysis of Saraceno’s artworks offers two alluring and overlapping propositions for affectively and radically mediating species and relational thresholds: vibration and divination; both of which are read as ‘techniques’ for producing shared knowledge at the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction, between seemingly non-communicating perceptual worlds. In turn, these techniques work to ‘radically mediate’ encounters with invertebrate others, opening up a relational threshold that does not simply link pre-existing bodies, but which produces and transforms human and nonhuman subjects in the generative event of their meeting. Saraceno’s interspecies encounters are theorised as mythopoetic interventions that aim at drawing forth the nonhuman within the human, and locating possibilities for attunement, resonance and ‘collective enunciation’ within.

Ally Bisshop (Ph.D. UNSW Art and Design 2018) is an artistic researcher whose work reaches across disciplines to critically and creatively explore the material, affective, ethical and relational thresholds between human and nonhuman. She is Lecturer at Griffith University Film School in Brisbane, Australia, and an active member of Tomás Saraceno’s transdisciplinary Arachnophilia research project – which uses the figure of the web-building spider to explore ecological possibilities for interspecies relation.

Annee MIRON. Graslands The grasslands ecological community of Australia’s Victorian Volcanic Plain is classified as Critically Endangered. Less than 2% remains compared to the late 18th century time of European invasion. And many of their unique species of plants and animals are on the brink of extinction. The garden at our apartment block was lifeless. When the wind blew nothing moved. The European trees were dying and the flat plane of lawn was ruled by couch grass and oxalis. So around 2017, I began a grasslands garden. As it grew, it changed the reasons others chose to live here. And it changed me. It generated connections. Soon I recognised it was a major artwork. The materials are our living others: plants and animals, the weather, the earth, the cast of shadows, our relationships, our histories, our learning, and the knowledge expressed between species. I started changing the garden in 2008, soon after I arrived. I tried broad brush strokes. Abstractions of one or two species. Often they all died. Then I observed that they like to have certain friends around to thrive. And so the indigenous grasslands found their way back. Its making and unmaking are both seasonal and perpetual objects. Always complete and always leading me to the next connection. Its essential diversity expresses strength, resilience, and hope.

Annee Miron is a visual artist based on the unceded First Nations lands of the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, Australia. Her practice uses found materials to create artworks that express our relationships with plants and places.

Theun Karelse. Monster Code “Monster refers to the power of human imagination, Code refers to encoding information through narrative strategies.

This talk gives an overview of experiments with encoding knowledge directly into landscape, indigenous moral geographies and landscape as memory-palace.

For most of human evolution the vast volume of cultural and environmental insight needed to thrive and indeed survive were passed on without written texts or databases. This was done in many ways in many different contexts, but it is hard to overstate how important the narrative structures were that consolidated knowledge across generations. These practices were universal, also in European contexts, but have been so thoroughly forgotten that there is no name for them.

MonsterCode is particularly interested in situations where immaterial cultural heritage is ‘stored’ directly into the landscape itself. Through hands-on experimentation this talk explores the different ways in which mental landscapes can be constructed, how different kinds of ‘data’ can be organised to form rich mental landscapes. For thousands (if not ten-thousands) of years landscape gave structure to thinking. Long walking lines formed central indexes connecting vast knowledge sets. The land even acted to some as a framework for moral guidance. Mental landscapes change the structure of thought. Representing knowledge holistically in a single space or collection of lines enable the practitioner to see patterns and relationships in ways writing can’t. Through narratives the landscape gains an entire layer of life. When applied to land, it gains a permanence that may rival any library. With evidence of narratives retaining knowledge over 8000 years.

Many theorists speak about what would constitute a more-than human culture. This talk explores it as a practice. This is applied animism; what happens if you start to infuse your own living environment with an entire layer of animism, where streets, rivers, stones, swamps, or beaches become part of your mental landscape. Animism is often dismissed as superstition, instead of seeing it as a vital means of consolidating crucial cultural knowledge and indeed wisdom.

This talk also explores experiments with the power of characters within knowledge-keeping narratives. In many cultures throughout time, mythical beings (monsters) have served to warn and protect, influencing our behaviour and carrying moral force.