WHITNEY-JADE HALSTED
MARC DION -THE SCHILDBACH XYLOTHEQUE AT DOCUMENTA IN KASSEL.
The tree books in Documenta are associated with the Enlightenment ideals but are also interested in the natural process and depict the trees lifecycle, however, they are not from a period of ecological thinking. The tree books in some sense represent the living tree and the death tree at the same time which has changed the perception of them from that of Enlightenment to the way they are seen today and in representations of nature.
The XYLOTHEQUE attempts to represent the tree in totality and acknowledges the tree as both a cultural and natural entity.
What was interesting for participants in the workshop was the following of the material from organism to artwork and because of the division of labour in our society it is hard to experience the chain of raw materials to commodity and therefore it is easy to feel disconnected from the natural process at the front end of the chain.
The production of these books involved expedition and productions dealing with nature that are share some similarities with many colonial expeditions and the artist tries to tease apart the cords that bind colonial enterprise from investigative field science.
As a foreigner to the places the artist visits he speaks of how the trees he researches speak of the space and its history and the input of the foreigner reminds us that all his not natural and that there are different ways of being, other priorities, and other stories- the idea of ‘the trouble shooter’ - which is a person from the outside that you bring into a situation to put fresh eyes on a problem.
Marc Dion
Tree Books
DONNA HARRAWAY - STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE
Harraway demonstrates a relationship of understanding between the Chthlucene (a kind of time place for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth), the chthonic (the beings of tentacles, spiiderlegs, cords etc that demonstrate and perform the meaningfulness of earth process and critters), the anthropocene and the capitalocene. She explores the kin (being a wild category that people try and domesticate) and kinship that connects all human and other than human beings to have a chance to unite.
Harraway explores the notion of extinction in relation to profit and power and the unequal consequences for the poor and the rich as well as the vastly burdens imposed on earth by the rich compared to the poor and even worse consequences for non humans everywhere.
Harraway includes research from biologist Deborah Gordon’s theories about ant interactions and what we can learn in relation to ecological development and non-hierarchical systems. Harraway examines from the “otherness” of nonwestern communities and has learnt that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas”, what quality of thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions.
The British anthropologist Marilyn Stathern wrote about the risk of relentless contingency; about anthropology as the knowledge practice that studies relations with relations, that puts relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other worlds.
Harraway uses the example of the drawing ‘ multispecies Cat’s cradle” by Nasser Mufti to describe the patterning and connections of ‘beauty’ , ‘harmony’ and order and “right relations with the world” including the right relations with human and non humans.
'Multispecies Cat's Cradle'
Drawing by Nasser Mufti, 2011
Jacques Ranciere - The lost thread - The democracy of modern fiction.
In this book fiction is cast here not as a structure of rationality but instead as an imaginary realm somewhere between being and nothingness. Ranciere calls this a ‘creative destruction ‘ of the representational regime of fiction.
Ranciere argues the issues of realist fiction as a random order of empirical facts that signal equality without rationality and attempts at reinventing representational effects by inundating the narrative structure with excessive description of a paradoxical usefulness. The paradoxical usefulness is precisely to signal the eternity of the new (bourgeois) reality and its historical permanence with the destructive dimension to demystify taboos, eradicate inherited psychic structures and so on.
If new fiction is ‘democracy in literature’ it is because of the effects of equality it is able to generate and which are hierarchical in essence- are shattered and new bodies and subjects able to emerge.
The core of representational regime, and its hierarchy of life forms , which had defined the space of fiction and commanded its organic unity, had simultaneously given way to a space of sensible coexistence of all individuals, things and situations- what Ranciere calls an aesthetic democratism.
The random succession of empirical facts is no longer the basis of poetic rationality but becomes the time itself of a ‘democracy of sensible coexistences’, ‘a chain of sensible events that weaves thoughts and wills’.
Ranciere argues it is not about the ontological status of the real - whether ‘the real is really real’ but instead is about the texture of this real. And the texture of this real is not about analysis but rather about the life lived by those who inhabit it. This texture undoes the hierarchies of old fiction and thereby operates in an effect of equality- a de-hierarchized one.