extinct animal and plant legs.
atmospheric phenominas
“Perception, viewed as an act of hospitality, is where mediation appears as the impact of the nearby outdoors on the reshaping of the indoors.” - Hilan Bensusan
Magic realism offers various strategies for otherness. Tuning into other beings their understanding and experience of time and space,whether interspecies, non-human agents, animal and plant species – and anthropomorphizing them not as a commodity but as votives or totem. Examples include mythical narratives of Navagunjara or Urania's Mirror.
Narrative materialities for interspecies collaboration and coexistence, as opposed to extraction based models of animal / agricultural cultivation. Enabling otherness and acts of othering to happen in domestic and urban spaces.
My work explores the idea of time, time of mortal bodies to archeological time, measurable landscapes (like the bodily time of cultivated landscapes), and immeasurable indivisible presence inbetween time and space. Through a series of interventions of making and unmaking these measured conditions in a hyper commodified fabric I aim to create meeting points for interspecies interactions with the goal of rewilding the city.
Ongoing : Cyborgian Geography, worldmaking and practical engagement in making speculative fictive materialities.
Ephemeral phenomenologies
Atmospheric condition that crafts a body that is simultaneously forming and unforming.
The interaction of atmospheric space, the formation of formless forms, and playful gestures between bodies in space lead to new forms of knowledge production alongside other beings.
From another point of time-view, however, it is almost as if the physiológoi, the nature philosophers of the remote pre-Socratic past already had all the necessary elements—namely, four— to diagnose what is going on: the Air, Fire, Earth, and Water. Anthropization of the Earth and biodiversity. In turn responding back through climate catastrophe and formation of complex responsive worlds*
To move away from anthropocentric ideas of need based mapping and exploitation of resources and move towards a trans species eco-cultural landscape. The measuring and local indexing of local geographies as produce and consumable bitesize portions that provide for food, shelter and clothing for anthropocentric societies has radically depleted our environment and its biodiversity. The idea of human supremacy in thought and action, and our ability to extract from instead of living with nature is troublesome. Enacting care practices by cultivating new futures by studying existing disparities.
From another point of time-view, however, it is almost as if the physiológoi, the nature philosophers of the remote pre-Socratic past already had all the necessary elements—namely, four— to diagnose what is going on: the Air, Fire, Earth, and Water. Anthropization of the Earth and biodiversity. In turn responding back through climate catastrophe and formation of complex responsive worlds*
Our sublunary sphere is made of are now catastrophically out of whack. By the same token, the steadily growing scarcity of time (acceleration) and space (contraction) is transforming these conditioning forms of our sensibility (Kant 1999 [1787]) into damaged frames conditioned by our insensitiveness, not to say insanity (Anders 2007 [1972]; Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017 [2014]). Humans have returned to a “state of nature,” albeit in an entirely new sense, to wit not as just another mammalian bioform with limited powers to modify its ecological niches but, so Chakrabarty (2009) memorably argued, as a macrophysical planetary force, moving, transforming, disaggregating, and dissipating matter and energy at unprecedented scales. Our species’ magnified entropic powers paradoxically make it even more subjected to the vagaries of an all-powerful and rapidly changing Earth. When one considers the empirical and transcendental un- certainty that pervades virtually all the assessments of the “Great Derangement” (Ghosh 2016), it would not be too farfetched to argue that the Anthropocene has confronted “technologically modern humans” with a supernatural or, more properly, alter- natural dimension, a “combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation” (Szerszynski 2017b) also known as Gaia,4 which is our task to theoretically explore and find a viable way within it
how long you consider the history of life forms” (Latour and Lenton 2019:19). A plane of immanence, according to the authors of What Is Philosophy?, has two faces, a “plane of Nature” and a “plane of Thought.” I prefer to imagine these two planes as forming a Möbius strip, a single, non-orientable surface that closes on itself with a twist. All the more so as Thought, be it conceived as different degrees of “sentience” or modes of “sapience,” is at long last being acknowledged as an attribute of many, perhaps all more-than-human bioforms and, in its human techno-economic mode, has ingressed into “physical” nature with disastrous consequences—a very material instance of “correlationism” (Meillassoux 2009 [2006]). This new plane of agential, historical nature (of nature prehending itself) is peo- pled by gods and spirits as well as by graphs and equations; by sacred rivers and extremophile life-forms as well as by satellites and computers; by earthbeings (de la Cadena 2015) and thinking forests (Kohn 2013) as well as by Critical Zone Observatories.
I am curious about building kinship in archival storytelling to learn from indigenous memory-witnessing from different places and designing spaces of the future.
N-toolkit : My on-going research explores sensory planetary investigations for crafting observational ritual based models through the lens of magic realism. I engage with a range of unique tools and methodologies that span both multi-cultural and ecological design, utilizing materials and practices rooted in decolonial strategies influencing architectural façades, exhibition design, playscapes and collective kitchens.
I'm deeply committed to process and material research by delving into material ontologies and exploring innovative ideas through material alchemy and creative assemblages. To speculate on design for past, present and future bodies.
Process and Research
- Material Alchemy
- Material Ontologies
- Speculative Design for Future Bodies
- Magic-real-isms
- Assemblages
It is no longer a question of interpretation, nor is it even one of understanding; rather, it is a question of learning – in other words, of daring: daring to experiment, to create, to make one’s own machines (social, amorous, literary, scientific, etc.). If we write, it is to become some- thing else, to fall into another state, to live differently. That is what is called ‘to rhizome’
bibliography in progress