Hyphen Colloquium: Cloud Sediments (2022)

Hyphen Journal presents:

Hyphen Colloquium: Cloud Sediments

To mark the publication of Hyphen Journal Issue 3: Ecologies, we invite you to join us for an online colloquium on Thursday 10 March 2022, 11am–6pm GMT.

This colloquium held in conjunction with Cloud Sediments – Hyphen Lab, an exhibition and events programme held at Ambika P3 in London as part of Ecological Futurisms, an emerging collective of CREAM faculty and doctoral researchers who explore modes of togetherness and exposition in the face of growing and ongoing global and local challenges.

The colloquium will be held via Zoom. Please register your attendance here by 9 March. Information on how to attend will be sent out before the event.

Programme
Abstracts
Biographies

Keynote

Diann Bauer (CREAM, University of Westminster)
Swarms of Collaboration: Ecological Futures, Xenofeminism, Deep Field Projects, team 2038 and A.S.T. (Alliance of the Southern Triangle)

In this talk, Bauer will speak about her practice via the range of collaborations she is involved with, focusing on the work of A.S.T. She will address the methodology of the various groups and share some of the content from each. The bulk of the work across all of the collaborations addresses the future in some way, each having a commitment to thinking about art’s role and responsibility with regard to the future. What can we as a field do in relation to the construction of futures? What forms can this take? What should the parameters of a practice be now?

A.S.T. – Black Water Rising — A.S.T., *Black Water Rising*, 2018

Programme

Panel 1
Cloud Sediments: Expansive Modes of Thought and Knowledge
11am–1pm GMT

Andrew Goodman (School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University)
Undoing the Human: *Wild* Art and a Poetics of Ecology

Caio Silva (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Te Herenka Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Dancing Over the Bones of the Dead

Renan Porto (Law School, University of Westminster)
Ecology Under the Falling Sky

Hanjo Berressem (Professor of American Studies at the University of Cologne)
Ecologizing Philology: ‘Reading in the Expanded Field’

Moderator: Matthias Kispert (CREAM, University of Westminster)

Panel 2
Sediment Clouds: Matters and Practices
2–4pm GMT

Lydia Halcrow (School of Art, Bath Spa University)
Tread lightly on the earth beneath

Manuela Johanna Covini (independent artist)
The New Village Project – I have to change my life, an experience

Japhy Wilson (School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester)
We Will Be the Immune Herd: Fear and Loathing Under Lockdown

Moderator: monika jaeckel (CREAM, University of Westminster)

Keynote
4:30–6:00pm

Diann Bauer (CREAM, University of Westminster)
Swarms of Collaboration: Ecological Futures, Xenofeminism, Deep Field Projects, team 2038 and A.S.T. (Alliance of the Southern Triangle)

Moderator: Sam Nightingale (Media, Communication & Cultural Studies & The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Abstracts

Diann Bauer (CREAM, University of Westminster)
Swarms of Collaboration: Ecological Futures, Xenofeminism, Deep Field Projects, team 2038 and A.S.T. (Alliance of the Southern Triangle)

Andrew Goodman (School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University)
Undoing the Human: *Wild* Art and a Poetics of Ecology

The contemporary turn towards ‘wildness’ and ‘rewilding’ seeks an intimacy and bewilderment of subjecthood. While wildness as a western concept has very problematic histories, in its reclaimed usage, Halberstam and Nyong’o argue that it can also enact an ‘anarrangement’ of normalised boundaries and categories. Gordon Pask’s 1957 chemical computing experiment that spontaneously grew an ear in response to environmental stimulus poses similar questions about the relational volition of matter, confronting not only the artist or scientist’s control of their research, but the fundamentally colonial notion of a world composed of discrete parts. This paper engages with a critical reading of Halberstam and Nyong’o’s writing to propose parallels between their conception of the wild and the science of self-organisation, both of which engage in aspects of decolonial critique through a troubling of the colonial mindset that separates in order to maintain mastery. Pask’s experiment suggests the possibility of alternative discourses and practices that emphasise an ethics of relation through techniques of wilding.

Caio Silva (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Te Herenka Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Dancing Over the Bones of the Dead

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some ideas behind the creative process of Dancing Over the Bones of the Dead. This is a short art video created as part of the JUNTA programme, an international contemporary dance festival that takes place in Teresina, Brazil. Our intention with the video is to talk about how fiction, art, science, philosophy and all forms of creative expression may work together in an effort to postpone an imminent end of the world. Living in such uncertain times, among the overwhelming and hopeless consequences of the Anthropocene, demands not just practical solutions, but ways to think and imagine as well, where storytelling and art-making occupy an important political position.

Renan Porto (Law School, University of Westminster)
Ecology Under the Falling Sky

This paper’s inquiry is developed through an interaction with the book The Falling Sky, written by anthropologist Bruce Albert and Yanomami Shaman Davi Kopenawa, which will be a centrepiece for the discussions proposed here. The paper is part of a research project that seeks a non-anthropocentric conception of ecology in Kopenawa’s thought. This conception of ecology is made possible through the cosmological comprehension of nature present in Yanomami cosmology, which brings a different way of dealing with cosmic entropy. Through this, I intend to develop possible dialogues between Kopenawa’s book and theoretical discourse on ecology, cosmopolitics and science with the purpose of showing the intellectual contributions of this book to contemporary discussions on ecology.

Hanjo Berressem (Professor of American Studies at the University of Cologne)
Ecologizing Philology: ‘Reading in the Expanded Field’

Taking its cue from the conceptual diagram Rosalind Krauss develops in her 1980 article ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ to expand the notion of sculpture vis-à-vis works of land art, the contribution develops an analogous conceptual diagram to expand the notion of reading [a complementary expansion of ‘writing’ would require a separate essay]. The overarching aim is to ecologize the field of philology, amongst others by diffracting the notion of ‘reading’ into a multiplicity of time- and site-specific ‘scenes of reading’ that make up an allover ecology. Such an ecologization creates an expanded field of ‘reading reading’ that includes levels of textuality, mediality and experience not covered by what Derrida would call, channeling Kant, a ‘distinguished’ [vornehme] philology. Going beyond deconstruction’s focus on human language, the contribution, which adds to what I call an ‘ecological tone recently adopted in the human sciences’, proposes to conceptually superpose the fields of reading and of living.

Lydia Halcrow (School of Art, Bath Spa University)
Tread lightly on the earth beneath

This paper reflects upon my practice-based PhD in Fine Art linking to Environmental Humanities. It explores the complexities of place through the case study of the Taw Estuary in North Devon. The artwork is created through a series of embodied processes fostering slow walking as a disruptive methodology.

Central to the project are notions of the entangled nature of our bodies in this and every place, the residues of our increasingly troubled human relationships with(in) our landscapes, and forming other sensorial ways of knowing, being and recording place.

The project has taken up Tim Ingold’s invitation to ‘follow the materials’, working with notions of Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter. I position the artwork in relation to Springgay and Truman’s Counter Cartographies, offering alternative material maps of this place that record the traces of human imprint and debris encountered in the everyday, at a point of rising seas and looming climatic tipping points.

Manuela Johanna Covini (independent artist)
The New Village Project – I have to change my life, an experience

The long, bulky title already gives the most important information about this website-project. Basically, it is about the question of how one can lead a good and proper life today, in 2022: free of fear, self-determined and self-responsible and integrated into the organism Earth. This is, of course, very complex and raises a multitude of considerations, which now, however, urgently require decisions. Because ‘my’ life can no longer be considered as a purely private ecology.

You must change your life! But who could say that to whom? Our modern psyche is now so organised that we no longer let any authority tell us what we must do. And this is what my imperative title suggests: I have to change. Today’s life is an ambivalent experience anyway, and my arguments for a ‘good life’ are a narrative of personal experiences and fictional, archaeological conjectures – presented as a website with video, text and photography.

Japhy Wilson (School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester)
We Will Be the Immune Herd: Fear and Loathing Under Lockdown

This experimental paper presents a chronicle of paranoid reflections, inscrutable nightmares and alienated psychogeographical wanderings amongst the interstitial spaces of an abruptly shut-down city. Welling up through this murky stream of consciousness, an image gradually emerges of the peculiar socioecology of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which capital and virus, animal and human, dream and reality, biopolitical management and governmental farce, become entangled in ever more surreal and disconcerting configurations. The narrative is framed by the targeting of the UK population as the future subjects of a putative herd immunity, which was initially posited by the government as the objective of its epidemiological strategy. The concept of herd immunity is deployed as a metaphor for the ideological closure of the political possibilities fleetingly opened by the crisis. Glimpses of the opportunity created by the lockdown for a radical break with the status quo are replaced by a realisation that this unique chance is being missed. Amidst a barrage of news reports, a plague of fever dreams and a litany of bewildering encounters with the rapidly mutating social and material fabric of the city, a terrible suspicion grows: an eventless future is coming into existence, and it will be inhabited by the Immune Herd.

Biographies

Presenters

Diann Bauer is an artist and writer based in London. She is currently a PhD candidate at CREAM, University of Westminster, working on questions regarding time at extra-human scale. Much of her practice is interdisciplinary, projects include: Laboria Cuboniks, with whom she collaboratively wrote and published Xenofeminism, A Politics for Alienation in 2015 and A.S.T., a working group of artists, architects and curators focusing on urbanism and climate change. Bauer has screened/exhibited at Tate Britain, The ICA, The Showroom and FACT Liverpool, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. She has worked with Arts at CERN and was part of the team working on the German Pavilion at the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice.
diannbauer.net

Andrew Goodman is a visual artist and writer with interests ranging from consciousness and generative algorithm design to process philosophy and ecology. His work encompasses concepts from the science of self-organisation, science fiction fabulations, queer and decolonial studies and activist ethics. His book Gathering Ecologies: Thinking Beyond Interactivity was published by Open Humanities Press in 2018. He teaches Visual Art and Environmental Humanities at La Trobe University, and is currently researching a book on rewilding and ecological ethics.
a.goodman@latrobe.edu.au

Caio Silva is a Terran, multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Teresina, Piauí, Brazil. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Te Herenka Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is part of a Brazilian art collective called Baile Afrosamurai and has experience working with non-profit collectives and free access festivals in underprivileged areas.
https://silvacaio.com/

Renan Porto is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer conducting a PhD in Law and Theory at the University of Westminster. He is also part of the research group Law and Theory Lab and collaborator of the Hyphen Collective at the same university. His research explores the ecology of cocoa production in the northeast of Brazil, looking through this investigation how societies are shaped in a non-anthropocentric perspective. His writings span the fields of political philosophy, anthropology, law and literature, addressing issues such as contemporary capitalism, technology, political practices and theoretical contributions from literature to the law.

Hanjo Berressem is Professor of American Studies at the University of Cologne. He has written books on Thomas Pynchon and Witold Gombrowicz and is the author of Eigenvalue: On the Gradual Contraction of Media in Movement (Bloomsbury 2018), and Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy and Felix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology (both Edinburgh University Press 2019).

Manuela Johanna Covini, 1960, lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City. Over the years, she has trained, studied and practiced professionally in various areas – including as producer and editor of two TV programmes in Switzerland. Her artistic work is concerned with how life goes beyond its own subjective limits. Unclear narratives deny the viewer orientation in time and place. Her projects explore the theme of simultaneity: simultaneity of space and time, of memory and present, of dream and reality, truth and lies… The digital image allows her to present her projects as a tangible, fictional universe in a distinctive visual vocabulary (as an aesthetically resilient material).
http://covini.com/TNVP_index_0.html

Lydia Halcrow is an artist, researcher and teacher. Her recently completed practice-based PhD explored collaborative working processes with a landscape developed through slow walking and sensorial practices. The body of artwork that emerges forms mark-making techniques to record trace within a landscape, with a focus on the materials, textures and human debris encountered. The body of work was recently awarded the Burton Environmental Artist Award and is held in public and private collections in the UK and Internationally.
www.lydiahalcrow.com
Instagram: @lydiahalcrow

Japhy Wilson is an Honorary Research Fellow in Politics at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Yale University Press, 2021) and Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid (Verso, 2014), and co-editor (with Erik Swyngedouw) of The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

Moderators

Sam Nightingale is an artist-researcher working within environmental media. He works with creative methodologies to re-imagine and re-image the spectral-material complexities of settler colonialism, extractivism, and its ongoing environmental impact on human and nonhuman worlds. His practice uses experimental forms of photography and speculative fieldwork to explore the geopolitical interface between history, ecology, and the image. He is co-editor of the book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee, forthcoming, 2022). Recent activities include Traversing Topologies (SARN), Spot on Economies (PACT Zollverein), Instituting (HKW Berlin). He is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London (Media, Communication & Cultural Studies & The Centre for Research Architecture). He is also a tutor in the Royal College of Art’s School of Architecture. www.samnightingale.com/

Matthias Kispert is an artist, researcher and educator based in London with an interest in the intersections of art, politics and activism. His practice crosses a range of media including video, sound, music, performance, installation and intervention. He is co-founding editor of Hyphen Journal and assistant editor at the Moving Image and Art Review Journal (MIRAJ), is convening the Radical Film Network and the Committee on Activism for the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE), and teaches at the University of the Arts London and the University of Westminster.
www.superconductr.org

monika jaeckel, based in Berlin and London, is a performer, researcher and writer with a background in artistic performance and new media. She recently completed a practice-based PhD at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster.