Switch between stories using these red buttons!
While ‘land’ is simply the earth beneath our feet, it is also a very nebulous concept that gives
way for vastly different ways of understanding it, and living on or with it.
How did you deal with boundaries of such a vast matter, especially while doing research for this
project? How did you deal with the feeling of having to make it concrete?
This project started with the goal of making a practical list, and a collection on advocacy work
and actions in relation to land and ownership for people to use, but quickly the project became
quite complex. Events
happening in
Russia
were affecting me deeply, and they felt like the only examples of advocacy work that came to
mind. Things I lived, and felt the urgency of through my experience, stood in the way of
completing my research task, or so it first seemed. But then I realised my experiences were
crucial to researching, asking questions, drawing lines, realising who I am in relation to a
place, and how that is affected by
land .
Seeing things in relation showed that the boundaries created by definitions and classifications
are
arbitrary. For example, the various expressions of action — claiming
one’s body
,
claiming one’s space,
making art ,
or
doing political actions
are in fact intertwined—the claim for body and the claim for self-expression is rooted in the claim for space, the claim for land, and the claim for existence on said land.
claiming one’s space,
making art ,
or
doing political actions
are in fact intertwined—the claim for body and the claim for self-expression is rooted in the claim for space, the claim for land, and the claim for existence on said land.
Along the way, I realised it is necessary to be intuitive and non-linear, to overlay, to put
things into many categories, to merge them, to bring together personal and hectic approaches
with ones that become structured and polished, and so on. Questioning and working against the
separation of things and events can establish a ground upon which to work with such complex a
meshwork of relations. This brought me to the urge to create spaces as artistic vessels for
communicating my ideas generated from this fluid collection of artistic work and actions.
As I have gotten to know you through working together, you have strong feelings about
generalisations, yet you don’t shy away from making leaps in your way of thinking and making.
How do you deal with the tension between the overview that theory can establish, and the
peculiarities of your own experiences?
For me theory is a way of seeing the world
not superior or inferior to
personal lived experience. It sometimes helps us to understand the world more, while at other
times theory contradicts our experience, and that which we perceive. What I have learned for
myself is to live through what I am reading and turn it into something embodied and felt. Some
ideas resonate with me and change my practice and outlook, while the world and my practice change how I
approach
ideas and theory. I often hesitate to use phrases like “I believe that…”. it feels like I cannot
integrate theory into my lived experiences, as if I am not skilled enough to handle its
generalisations. I am constantly learning to be brave enough to work through and develop firm
beliefs, I try to use leaps and generalisations as tools for understanding rather than
dismissing them. I think there is a complex balance in having firm beliefs that are in constant
flux with the particularities of others.
There are two seemingly unrelated matters that can be considered a thread in your series of
stories, which are belonging and distributed authorship, a term that you introduced to me in
this project.
Can you elaborate on what distributed authorship means to you, how it comes back in this design
project, and how it relates to matters of belonging?
Authorship is an invention of capitalism, and is much like owning
real estate
. Some (…) do not want to nor can they own land and ideas. Does it mean they have no thoughts
and no land to stand upon? In fact authors never stand outside the systems that enable them to
be; we are never detached from the people who came before us, and novelty is not the ultimate
creative goal. Instead it is the ability to map and draw new routes without erasing, or
overlooking the landscape, the capacity to speak without silencing, to mix, re-mix and accept
connections along shared struggles and common causes throughout the years. to me is accepting that I always
build upon the work of others. In this project,
my thoughts, ethics and design solutions are not mine, they did not emerge in a vacuum, they
emerged from collisions
with others and my surroundings. I use tools created by others, which
allows me to create through the research of many; I sit on a chair built by others, talk to Rana
and friends and teachers, have the opportunity to get the education and time to work on this
project. What is the need of claiming sole authorship, of creating a line between me and the
world if not the need to monetise?
Lacing Lands is a collection of remembering how one lives on and with land. How so?
We have forgotten of how strongly we are all tied
to land
, and to the resources and space it provides, how
much it influences all the complex workings of our politics and day-to-day lives. We forget to
be present and curious of material flows. We want to run away from what we might call the
‘ruins’ that our politics
and our daily
routines leave behind. Instead, we running towards utopias that shift our attention away from
our habitat that is lived by us but does not belong to us. Each and every politics requires
different kinds of actions, as people and ruins
mutually implicate one another and are in
constant co-habitation, which differ depending on local circumstances. To move forward we need
to think in non-linear and multiple geographies and time frames—not one timeline that we all
climb in order to reach Mars.
I feel the urge to listen to those whose habitats have been destroyed. I want to think of our shared land as a complex network of actors, ground ourselves, claim our spaces in order to recreate spaces differently.
I feel the urge to listen to those whose habitats have been destroyed. I want to think of our shared land as a complex network of actors, ground ourselves, claim our spaces in order to recreate spaces differently.
What does storytelling in and through design make possible?
I feel that storytelling most closely conveys and represents how we live, and in that sense it
allows for a more immediate experience. We remix everything, even our memories constantly
rebuild themselves, that goes also for storytelling, yet at times storytelling in its chaotic
and sometimes inconsistent raw shape transmits how life
is, and with it, a sense
of truthfulness that one can recognize and accept as life itself. Every time we create a work,
we create a space and we embed a narrative or a guiding system (a pathfinder) into this space.
Yet often we are not mindful of what default narratives we integrate into our designs, what
default tools, formatting and programming languages we use. I feel that these tools and
formats, and the need for polishing and rendering design for the sake of clarity overpower
inconsistent and complex matters of people's relation to environments and their stories.
Accepting chaos and withholding default tools and stories gives space for a diffractive
approach
; it allows us to understand the
relationship between design and place-making politically, and place-making as a political tool.
I have tried to think through this in terms of
patchy-ness
, and have used it in this project in order to increase the depth of our
screens.
Co-authors:
- Alexei Navalny, “Putin's palace. History of world's largest bribe”, 2021
- Siberian fires 2019
- DISmagazine, 'How to Hide from Machines'
- IC3PEAK, “There is no death anymore”, 2018
- Protests prompted by Navalny’s video, 23rd of January in Russia
- Feral Atlas
- Studio Joanie Lemercier, ‘The problem of CryptoArt’, 2021
- Katherine Hayles ‘Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, 2000
- Moor Mother on Sampling, Afrofuturism and Collaboration | Red Bull Music Academy, 2019
- Black Quantum Futurism
- Jane Hutton, lecture, “Material Flows”, 2016
- Hambach forest protests, 2018
- Nashin Mahtani, Etienne Turpin, 'There is no capital —Reflections on accumulation and abandonment in Indonesia', 2020
- Bruno Latour on Critical Zones, 2020
- Van Brummelen & De Haan, ‘Stones have laws’, 2018
- Maria Alyokhina, ‘Riot days’, 2018
- Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 2007
- Anna Tsing, ‘The mushroom in the end of the world’, 2017