SWAMP AND ATOLL, BLACK HOLES LIKE DANDELIONS

Workshop with Regina de Miguel
23-25th November 2021

This workshop arises in the context of the process followed in the exhibition, which took place at The Green Parrot, “Nerve Bushes like Coral Forests”. Unlike other previous projects by Regina de Miguel, which are characterised by various displacements to extreme territories (Atacama desert, Deception Island in Antarctica, or the Chocó Jungle in Colombia) and in which geopolitical contexts within a hybridization of genres largely determine the narrative, “Nerve Bushes like Coral Forests” is the product of an imaginary evoked by the artist, during the forced global confinement, in which science fiction and climate fiction stories, anti-expeditions and auto-ethnographies become intertwined. In this workshop, the artist proposes collectively sharing and rehearsing these narratives.

From a posthuman setting that transcends physical paradigms and deconstructs maps, our task is to think about how to inhabit it. What new politics, poetics and ontologies do we need? Resignifying is not an easy task. And although we were used to imagining with pre-existing modes of production and materials, now we must learn to connect in other ways, contemplate unwritten stories to try to displace the regulating axes of knowledge.

For this, we carry out speculative displacements to mythopoetic scenarios, that is, those prone to the creation of new myths and interfaces with a psychic entity of their own, to deal with catastrophic times, attempting to overcome the subject/object dichotomy and seeking out the articulations between thought, memory, and territory. For example, thinking of the swamp as a living being, at the threshold between the earth and water. An ecosystem or environment that fosters infinite symbiotic relationships, questioning the idea of border to delve into deep materiality. A swamp, atoll, an islander, or a bestiary from which to hug that which is complex and strange.

Through the collective reading of various texts and the revision of artists’ works, we take examples of climate fiction as tools from which to link not only biological but also tangible realities, such as affects, and think about the notion of the Slow Violence: in the islands of the Tuvalu archipelago or the Great Barrier Reef, what happens is not an a priori spectacular catastrophe of great magnitude of high visibility and coverage such as the events in Chernobyl or Fukushima. These dislocated places in the ocean gather a great quantity of violence that cannot be condensed into one single event, in a single space or time, or a single word. Rather, they represent a long path that has led to a fathomless destruction. A violence that, like that suffered by many bodies, occurs slowly, gradually, and out of sight, scattered in time. Lethal by accumulation.

Moreover, we carry out a collective work of creating a profane offering, raised from the desire for protection and Thautmaturgy (θαῦμα ‘miracle’, ‘marvel’, y ἔργον ‘work’). An ensemble that may appeal to the dissolution of what is alive and inanimate from the urgency and interdependence. An extravagant bestiary in which the immediately threatened reminds us that the process is slow, invisible, but inexorable on the living and the inert.

What happens to bodies is not immediately visible; it accumulates implacably, like the acidification of the seas.

Dates: Tuesday 23, Wednesday 24 and Thursday 25 of November. At 17-20h.
Saturday 27 of November: projection of Catábasis in Zumzeig Cinema.
Location: The Green Parrot. C/Vilamarí 57, 08015 Barcelona

Regina de Miguel (Málaga, 1977): Her interdisciplinary artistic practice is characterized by research and development of processes aimed at the production of knowledge and hybrids objects. Read more about the artist and her work on her website.

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