A Multiple Community E-Book

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

• Herausgeber: Edições Sesc SP
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The proposal of this second volume of Leituras is to address the debate on the global South from other models of constructing reality and to speculate on the potential impact of alternative forms of organization on current times. To this end, it compiles a series of non-Western cosmologies which, while not new, present renewed interest and originality for their reduced visibility. Such forms of organization condense a more integrated kind of involvement of the individual with the collective, but also with his symbolic and natural environment; therefore, they have a direct impact on how reality is understood and constructed. This e-book features images that are best viewed on tablets.

Leseprobe

READINGS

A MULTIPLE COMMUNITY

EDITORIAL CURATOR

JOÃO LAIA

SOUTHERN PANORAMAS

The Sesc_Videobrasil collection of publications includes different formats, each one appropriate to a specific manner of approaching problems identified as crucially important for the contemporary debate. Among them are the catalogs of the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, which feature curatorial cross-sections of art production of the geopolitical South; catalogs of solo shows by crucial artists of the contemporary art circuit; and Cadernos Sesc_Videobrasil, a publication dedicated to a reflective intersection between texts and artworks.

As of the 19th Festival, this collection was expanded with the Readings series, a compilation of essays targeting the vectors explored by the artists and developed by the curators of each edition of the Festival. Thus, Readings: 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil seeks to probe deeper into the guiding principles of this Festival, highlighting ancestral worldviews, non-hegemonic forms of building knowledge and their respective decolonization tactics, all conducive to an alternative interaction with history and the contradictions of present times. Therefore, Readings affords a more profound dialog between visual arts and other idioms, as well as other fields of knowledge.

The transversality inherent in this mode of addressing issues proves capable of generating resonances among distinct cultural indexes, providing perspectives which are more often than not surprising. Sesc understands that facing incongruities inherited from the colonial past and renewed by the peripheral geopolitical condition requires permanent efforts to foster education, cultural practices, research, and, ultimately, critical thinking. Alongside other initiatives and publications produced in partnership with Associação Cultural Videobrasil, this book contributes to incorporate essential debates into the open and possibility-rich field of contemporary art.

DANILO SANTOS DE MIRANDA

Regional Director of Sesc São Paulo

CONTENTS

FOREWORD Solange O. Farkas

A MULTIPLE COMMUNITY João Laia

DREAM NOTES Apichatpong Weerasethakul

BLOG#3: THE CONTAGIOUS SELF Leela Gandhi

COSMOLOGY OF A RAS — NOTES FOR AN ESSAY Invernomuto (Simone Trabucchi & Simone Bertuzzi)

TENGO PUERTO RICO EN MI CORAZÓN: THE YOUNG LORDS BETWEEN THE STREET AND THE IMAGINARY Daniel R. Quiles

BLACK TO THE FUTURE: AFROFUTURISM 1.0 Mark Dery

TRANSFORMERS @ FORMAT 3: REALITY Sophia Al-Maria

AND APPLE TREES WILL BLOOM ON MARS Arseny Zhilyaev

HOW A PEASANT TRICKED A DEVIL. NOTES FOR NEW COSMOGONIES Valentinas Klimašauskas

CRIC Catalina Lozano

NEW STUDIES Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

SENSING GROUNDS: MANGROVES, UNAUTHENTIC BELONGING, EXTRA-TERRITORIALIT Natasha Ginwala, Vivian Ziherl

MONOLOGUE Sophia Al-Maria

SYMBIOGENESIS, SYMPOIESIS, AND ART SCIENCE ACTIVISMS FOR STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE Donna Haraway

BIRTHPLACE UNDER SEA FOAM AND FROTH Zadie Xa

Captions and credits

Contributors

Viewpoints emerging from the global South have always been the main focus of the research which guides the activities of Videobrasil. Long before the term even existed, the contemporary art festival we organize in partnership with Sesc São Paulo has been a privileged venue of speech: by researching, gathering, and exhibiting every two years a new set of works by artists from these regions, it unveils a profusion of intriguing narratives about our reality, our world, and our history, revealing not only the issues that mobilize them but also the connections they suggest, the choices they conceive, the solutions they descry.

The Readings series was created as an outlet for the reverberations of this valuable, and still insufficiently appreciated, contribution to thought. The first volume, released in 2016, discussed the meaning of the very concept of global South in the field of art production. Entrusted to the Portuguese curator João Laia, who was a member of the curatorial commission of the 20th Festival (2017) alongside Brazilian curators Ana Pato, Diego Matos, and Beatriz Lemos, this book exemplifies in various ways the power of a thought that reorganizes forms of knowledge and challenges interdicts—encroaching on watertight divisions between art and science, between man and nature, between dream and reality—to reach original critical views.

Visual or written, ironic or poetic, dense or deceptively light, the contributions concur in not acquiescing to entrenched conventions, whether those that irrevocably separate fields of knowledge or those that determine who the winners and losers of history are; in many ways, by retrieving views of the future anticipated in the past, probing into roots shared by art and activism, or evoking traditional myths to shed light on urgent realities, they embody and extend the spirit of the Festival’s works, seen in the images that open and close this book.

Good readings.

SOLANGE O. FARKAS

Chief curator of the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil

João Laia

A MULTIPLE COMMUNITY

We are experiencing a critical moment of intense reconfiguration. Global dynamics sweep across the planet, challenging organizational forms previously deemed stable, while revealing the interpenetration of areas often represented in isolation, such as the mutual relations between economy, ecology, and politics. We are witnesses to a return of positions that privilege the individual, translated into conservative and nationalist measures, frequently associated with a limited conception of religion. From Brazil to India, from Russia to the United Kingdom, from Turkey to Australia, from Egypt to Angola, through the Middle East, Poland, and the United States, a generalized wave of a regressive nature seems to mark our present and near future. Advances we deemed safeguarded are being questioned, and social and geopolitical conflicts have reemerged with renewed force. We find ourselves facing a complex period which seems to represent the end of an era of widespread development of our societies.

The 2008 financial crisis is often pinpointed as the trigger behind the accelerations of such trends. Southern Europe was perhaps the most visible initial facet of its impact, with the collapse of countries such as Greece and Portugal. But the shock waves were also felt in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. The referendum that ended with the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union, known as Brexit, or the election of Donald Trump are easy examples, both products of a populism that exploits hard times to spread fear and seize power. This reconfiguration also has profound consequences in the symbolic context of the so-called global South. The rising trend of the BRICS countries has been challenged, not only by the economic slowdown in China, Russia, and India but also by the political upheavals and financial maneuvers that have marked, for example, the Brazilian setting. More recently, countries such as Turkey have been at the core of intense conflicts that have also destabilized their position in the world setting.

Beyond the state, other agents have progressively imposed their presence at the global level to the point of questioning the role of the former as the primary source of power in the current geopolitical context. This is not new in the case of multinational corporations and terrorist organizations. However, both have increased the scope and scale of their activities. The exponential development of mobile communication through portable computers, cell phones, and tablets, and the widespread dissemination of the Internet have opened up a whole new field of action with long-lasting effects and encouraged the creation of networks which, despite their geographical dispersion, are permanently linked. The power of corporations such as Alphabet (which includes Google) and Apple, and the emergence of groups like Al-Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or Daesh) are some of the most visible signs of this movement, which gives rise to speculation on the relationship between the phenomenon of terrorism and the process of neoliberal globalization.

Parallel to this, the recent exponential growth of migration movements is another indicator of the repercussion of this type of agency that transcends the state. Today, due to some factors, such displacements are particularly directed towards Europe, largely resulting from armed conflicts and economic conditions of exploitation. To this case may be added similar examples such as the flight of Rohingya Muslim communities in Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma), the ongoing population exodus in Venezuela, and the tension between Mexico and the United States. The imminence of an ecological catastrophe is another continuous and overwhelming transnational issue, with new records of average global warming registered between 2013 and 2015. Events such as the Fukushima nuclear meltdown or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill show how urgent it is to rethink the economic model centered on the harmful and dangerous energy patterns of today. One may also mention the correlation between the ecological and economic situation and the migration movements. If global warming is not stopped or, ideally, reversed, the rising sea level will have enormous effects on densely populated areas of the planet, causing the relocation of several population centers. The ensuing change in predominant systems of production and circulation of wealth would cause unprecedented pressure on remaining habitable areas, potentially igniting new conflicts for the control of said areas.

If we adopt a broad conception of ecosystem, which includes not only the relationship of humanity to nature but also an entire network of interdependencies between ecological, economic, and social structures, the impacts of the current situation become evident. The planet is being affected as a whole: multiple connections, which arise not only from the various levels and speeds of the phenomenon of globalization but also from the very structure of the ecosystem, demonstrate the inexistence of an exterior. There is a need to problematize the economic system responsible for these developments. But perhaps it is even more urgent to rethink the model of society that supports this system, as well as the shared ways of understanding and organizing the world, which in turn build and are built by that same society. Periods of crisis are moments of intense reorganization, which enable and encourage the emergence of new forms. The contemporary crisis can be viewed as both symptom and cause of the bankruptcy of a way of thinking that, in recent centuries, has dominated the world, imposing its control. An inherently individualistic conception, centered on a particular form of the human being: male, white, and heterosexual. Effective questioning of the current model of society demands not only an in-depth criticism of these lines of thought; but also, and urgently, the demonstration of alternative ways of conceiving the world.

Social identities like nation or global South are imagined communities, cultural constructions related to founding myths; they propose a shared space capable of combining specific contexts, which are well-known, with broader settings, which we may never have experienced before. Drawing on these characteristics of our symbolic collective, dynamics of identification that construct countries and societies, this book brings together a series of models to interpret real life that suggest different forms of social organization. It features several integrated readings of our environment whose frameworks indicate and include developments of an ecological, economic, and political nature, building bridges between territories that are culturally and geographically apart. The cast of actors contributing to this publication—anthropologists, artists, curators, philosophers, and researchers—fosters a dialogue that, collectively and in the singularity of each case, presents other possibilities to understand and organize the world. Rodrigo Hernández’s work separates the various essays, functioning as a structuring element which holds the publication. Erecting a hybrid symbolic universe, which draws on a wide range of references—such as Italian futurism and pre-Columbian art—the constant reappearance of Hernández’s images underscores the plasticity of our collective imagination. The dreamlike tone of the unpublished essay by Apichatpong Weerasethakul opens the book as a sign of the flexible character of our imagined communities and, consequently, of the possibility of transforming those structures.

Interrelating the investigations of a botanist and physicist (J.C. Bose), a spiritual and political leader (Mahatma Gandhi), and a pioneer of photography (Henri Cartier-Bresson), Leela Gandhi’s essay introduces the existential interconnectedness of Guru Democracy. The duo Invernomuto (Simone Trabucchi & Simone Bertuzzi) explores the eclecticism of Rastafarian symbology, combining political consciousness, spirituality, and music. Following up on the analysis of a hybrid collective imagination, Daniel Quiles introduces us to the collective The Young Lords, whose activities go back to the early 1960s in Chicago, later extending to New York and Puerto Rico. Situating the movement in the broader context of US history, Quiles underlines the internationalist viewpoint adopted, which comes across issues shared with remote communities. The contributions of Mark Dery, Sophia Al-Maria, and Arseny Zhilyaev feature different perspectives related to the idea of the future. Dery, who coined the term Afrofuturism, proposes a new reading of his seminal essay Black to the Future, in which he investigates the relationship between the African-American community, science, and technology through the lens of the literary genre of science fiction. Sophia Al-Maria explains the concept she developed in the mid-2000s, Gulf Futurism. The essay emphasizes that this idea does not merely refer to discourses about the city, to which she has been permanently associated, underlining the importance of her analysis on the transformations of our body in the contemporary context. Zhilyaev introduces us to Russian Cosmism by analyzing the emergence, development, and current heritage of the movement, connecting the different approaches within it (related to science and religion) and elucidating the unified system produced by the interaction between universe and human being that it translates.

Testing which historical cosmogonies can teach us about the present, Valentinas Klimašauskas uses a figure from Lithuanian paganism as a tool to analyze the contemporary mythology of post-democratic capitalism. Klimašauskas’s essay is followed by Catalina Lozano’s contribution, which presents another example of the relationship between worldview and economic-political control. Lozano describes the opposition of CRIC (Cauca Regional Indigenous Council) to neoliberal economic development in Colombia, explaining how the Council’s action expresses a notion of multifaceted and transformative cosmology. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané presents an unpublished visual essay that examines his conception of the relationship between culture and nature, influenced by the Brazilian indigenous collective imagination. In the context of the book, these spectral images become both a reflection of the plastic potential of narratives that interpret our life, as in Weerasethakul’s contribution, and haunting recollections of the context of historical exploitation inflicted on indigenous communities as a consequence of agri-food or extraction industries, as in Lozano’s following essay. “Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality,” a collaboration between Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl, looks at the mangrove to speculate on how, in the past, the amphibious constitution of this type of terrain functioned as a barrier to colonizing activities and how, nowadays, its nature can be a tool to reflect on the generalized context of crisis, offering a flexible stance that defends multiple forms of life. The second contribution by Sophia Al-Maria features a poem written in the voice of a newly awakened nonhuman entity. The text is presented in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Wayuu Naiki, an indigenous language from the Colombian region close to the border with Venezuela that contains essential oil and gas reserves.

For several decades, Donna Haraway’s work has proposed a broad conception of our universe that horizontally encompasses human and nonhuman agencies, a position with broad ethical-political implications. This last written essay of the book serves as a focal point around which all the elements of the project orbit, forming a rhizomatic network of multiple frictions. Finally, Zadie Xa’s visual essay, based on a video installation by the artist, explores her family’s history through a fable inhabited by hybrid entities and other fantastic elements, ending the project with a return to a dreamlike universe close to Weerasethakul’s introduction.

We live in a period in which local gestures and stances have global impacts. It is impossible to act or think in isolation; we must view the world from an integrated perspective, without, however, erasing individual idiosyncrasies. It has become more realistic to trust in a view that explores differences through a unifying consciousness of the history of the human species and its position in the context of the planet, a small, fragile celestial body within an accelerated process of climate change that is triggering drastic transformations in its systemic operation. It is therefore essential to imagine new ways of being in the world that connect us more closely, emphasizing our belonging to the complex network composed of different forms of life that makes up our ecosystem. A posture open to the unknown, which celebrates this diversity of combined existences.

Focused on the metamorphosis that marks this era, this project is contextualized in the current lack of stability of forms and narratives to present inclusive views of the world. Like the diasporic and migration movements that have defined the human species from the beginning, our planet is multicolored, multispecies, multidimensional. Another world has always been here, and the need for narratives that embrace its multifaceted nature is increasingly evident.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

DREAM NOTES

KHON KAEN

I was with some group of people. We looked up to the sky and saw a metal structure floating far away against the dark. It was a combination of metal trusses that were moving slowly, changing positions. We thought it was some kind of military machine. Slowly it came down, rotating around itself along the way. Then the scene cuts to the interior of a metal cage, with I and others sitting, like we were on a Ferris wheel. We were moving upwards. I somehow knew that we were going to a floating hotel’s lobby. There were people in suits waiting at the lobby with bright lights. While the other passengers were enjoying the ride, a thought came to me that our vehicle was an alien cage. They could crush us any moment.

PARIS

Last night, Teem was dreaming about being at the border of a cliff. He looked down and saw a valley full of water, with the sculpture of a giant tiger looking down. It was looking at its own reflection on the water.

Then he dreamt he was riding with me, and I suggested to have seafood for dinner. (This was not me, because I am generally not fond of seafood in Chiang Mai). In his dream, I liked horseshoe crab. So we ordered lots of it. It had many eggs inside its belly.

CHIANG MAI

Two days ago, I dreamt about a mixture of horror film and meditation. I am sorry now that I didn’t write it down as soon as I woke up. It was quite an important dream because it was about awareness, yet I didn’t know I was dreaming. The experience was lucid, but it was not a lucid dreaming.

There was a dwarf-like alien, with big eyes and wrinkly skin, who wanted to either capture or kill me. It followed me through an anonymous town. I soon found out that even though it had big eyes, it didn’t really ‘see’ me. It sensed me. The way to escape it was to be mindful and focus on my breath or on the action I was doing, such as walking. When my mind went in different directions, this alien sensed the thoughts, and it appeared in front of me. So, the whole dream, I was trying to be mindful.

I don’t remember much, but it happened in a small town. Many people were walking up the hill. We were silhouettes.

HONG KONG

I’ve read E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of The World again. I was alarmed that I had forgotten so many things, such as what different ways our texts were formed, how powerful the Syrians were, and how our dates’ names derived from the stars.

Leela Gandhi

BLOG#3: THE CONTAGIOUS SELF1

I’ve carried these two items (A/V for a change) with me for a very long time now, believing they belong together as pieces in the puzzle of guru democracy. The first—about which I’ll talk directly—is a 1931 recording made by Gandhi (MKG) for the Columbia Gramophone Company whilst in London for the disappointing Second Round Table Conference on Indian constitutional reform. Wryly claiming low expertise on political matters, he offers his thoughts on religion instead. Thereon, in midst of a meditation upon existential interconnectedness he endorses the “marvelous researches” of the physicist-turned-botanist J.C. Bose for giving evidence of a shared life-energy even amongst the most apparently inanimate substances. It’s not surprising that MKG cites Bose (also much admired by Romain Rolland), who was an ardent follower of Swami Vivekananda and new Indian mysticism, and internationally famous in early-C20th science-circles for his public demonstrations of acute affective sensitivity in tin-foils, metal plates, mimosa plants, and palm trees. Seeking to prove there was unity rather than hierarchy in nature (no higher/lower forms, just shared livingness), Bose frequently records the vertiginous sensation of symbiosis during experiments during which he finds himself catching the mood of the recording machine, or influencing, by his own psychic state, the disposition of the plant (or other substance) under observation.

At about the same time as Bose’s researches, MKG had also commenced kin politico-spiritual experiments of his own to test whether work on the self had a communal effect—not by way of influence and example so much as by a spectral circuit: e.g., did fasting, not just symbolically but alchemically expiate the violence of others? Was there a sympathetic magic whereby acts of personal expropriation or self-reduction actually conjured gifts for the dispossessed? Did the giving up of one’s own conatus essendi, or right to existence, yield collateral for life itself? In other words, was the self of sadhana contagious? Could you catch the self-work of those around you and, likewise, virally, communicate yours across short and long distances? Here’s MKG, variously: “how that chain can be established I do not know as yet. But I’m striving after it’’; “Individuality is and is not even as every drop in the ocean is and is not. It is not because apart from the ocean it has no existence”; “I am an irrepressible optimist. My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence. The more you develop it in your own being, the more infectious it becomes till it overwhelms your surroundings and by and by might oversweep the whole world.”

OK. Now for exhibit # 2, which comes with something of a story attached to it: it’s the catalogue of an Henri Cartier-Bresson (henceforth HCB) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, published “posthumously” after HCB was assumed dead following his three-year-long incarceration as a POW by the Germans during World War II, whilst serving on a film unit for the French army. HCB joined the French resistance upon his release, taking pictures which combined a profound anti-fascism with acute distaste for the German-baiting which followed the end of the war. Fans of the photographer will recall the morally discomfiting still from his film Le Retour, which shows a Gestapo stool pigeon being exposed at a displaced persons camp in Dessau, Germany, by a woman with bared teeth and a hand preparing to strike. In this period, further to his commitments to anti-imperialism and the third-world revolutions sweeping across the world, HCB became increasingly interested in the gurus. This was also on account of their growing popularity in the West. Sri Ramakrishna and MKG aside, Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramana had each been written up in popular U.S. magazines such as Holiday and Life. Sri Ramana, especially, had shot into fame following W.H. Maugham’s fictional rendition of his encounter with the elusive guru in The Razor’s Edge (he’d later elaborate this meeting in an essay called ‘The Saint,’ for which he got a lot of help from Christopher Isherwood).