OBJECTHOOD #8
Music commissioned to Jessica Ekomane. Curated and produced by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros.
In previous episodes we have hinted at limits as an interesting feature of objects that are often fuzzy or vague, and therefore hard to outline. This time around, we take a radically different approach to limits. A much darker, urgent take on boundaries and edges, if you will. This is not so much about ontological boundaries, but rather about the dangers of looking at the world with no limits in mind.
The first one of our conversations features Costa-Rican anthropologist Andrea Ballestero, who tells us about her experiences, her field work, and her conceptualisations in the analysis of the underground world. She focuses on aquifers, as incredibly complex objects, and on our relation to their physical edges. As she puts it, “Aquifers interrupt many of our sense-making habits, as they require that we recalibrate our analytic and political vocabularies to oscillating figures and grounds, to unusual volumes and their dynamics.” We talk to her about water and movement, volumetric thinking and saturated spaces, but also about caves and mines as the objects that geology and the mining industry have primarily used to shape our preconceptions of the subsurface. And we consider the ideological baggage that comes with those assumptions. Andrea’s work problematises the commonly accepted view of the underground world as a fixed, static medium. She talks about that, and also about the commodification of water, “a substance that pushes all sorts of boundaries at the conceptual, pragmatic, embodied, and affective levels.”
Our second guest, American artist and activist Chris Korda, talks, and sometimes yells, about extinction in relation to population growth. Our conversation turns to procreation, exponential curves, post-antihumanism and how all of these things are closely entangled in our species-wide obsession with the absence of limits. We also talk about the changing tactics of Korda’s Church of Euthanasia, a non-profit educational foundation devoted to restoring balance between Humans and the remaining species on Earth: from the sarcasm and shock tactics of their early days, to the current version of the organisation, much more concerned with getting the message across, as loud as possible.
OBJECTHOOD #9 keeps asking questions about the limits and borders of stuff all around us – from countries to nuclear sites. We talk to Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou about her work on exclusion zones and radioactive waste management, focusing on temporal and spatial thresholds. Our second guest, researcher and activist Nishat Awan, talks about unsettlement and geopolitical borders, especially in relation to Pakistan and her field work in Balochistan. Get ready for a deep dive into the oddness of boundaries, including political demarcations, the interplay between insects and radiation leaks, forced displacements, and gigantic triangles, to name but a few. Curated by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros
Sarah Nuttall
Over the past 10 years, South African scholar Sarah Nuttall's work has focused on post-colonial criticism, urban theory and literary and cultural studies, especially in relation to Africa and its diasporas. Her current area of interest revolves around water, heavy rainfall, flooding and hydrocolonialism, and how they intersect with materiality, time and daily life. But also around how water can be traced and analysed across works of literary fiction from the African continent. ‘Pluviality’, the umbrella term she coined for this purpose, serves as a conceptual framework and a methodological approach to her study of rain in an era of extreme climate emergency.
Marking silences
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this second episode, poet Myung Mi Kim speaks with geographer, Kathryn Yusoff about the lives and histories demarcated in the silence between words and amongst rock strata.
Emergent Interstellar Dust
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In the first episode, artist and poet, Himali Singh Soin and astrobiologist, Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe discuss signs of life from the cosmos, the theory of panspermia and the biosphere of the galaxy.
Andrea Ballestero
Whether in her teaching or her participation in the popular resistance for universal access to water, Andrea Ballestero’s approach is a feedback exercise that completely blurs the division between theory and practice. Her work advocates a collaborative, feminist modus operandi on ethnography, as well as the affordances of the environment: be that an ecosystem, a regulatory agency, or 'the technolegal devices at the centre of these political mobilisations'. We talk to Andrea Ballestero about aquifers and amorphous futures, about imagination as an essential part of the academic research process, and about the potential of bureaucratic practices as cogs in a possible machinery of change—which does not necessarily have to involve large-scale global transformations.