Climate chaos is an irreversible fact according to the latest scientific reports. This, by no means, becomes justification for human kind to maintain our exploitative relationship with the earth, or invest all our efforts in the possibility of escaping and colonising other planets. We too are earthlings. As long as we continue separating ourselves from nature, the damage is bound to multiply. The need to admit the symbiotic nature of our relationship with the ecosystem and re-shape the way we self-identify as human kind is urgent.
Drawing upon Andreas Weber's Matter and Desire, this essay examines how the works Resisting Extinction by The BodyCartography Project and Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars by Eglė Budvytytė relate to the more-than-human to explore the effects of an art rooted in Weber's Ecology of Love. Can it be that embracing the more-than-human in art can pave the way for an essential ontological shift in our response to the environmental catastrophe?
It comes down to narratives of separation
Philosopher Donna Haraway stated: “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (Haraway 2016: 12). Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are create us. They are how we begin to make sense of the world and the way we see the world affects how we act in it; if I think myself separate from nature, if the story of my becoming is reduced to one of cruel survival competition between species, I continue treating life around me as a competitor. It is my belief that we can and need to change our descriptions of reality to paint an interconnected system of reciprocal inspiration, dependency, penetration and entanglement (Weber, 2014: 7).
The ontological shift: Do we know who we mean when we say we?
In Weber’s writings it becomes apparent that the more we understand about how organisms operate in an ecosystem, the more evident it becomes that in fact, the separation between nature and me, you, us is conceptual. The vast complexity of the world around us is revealing itself to be a product of intertwined processes of symbiosis (living together), sympoiesis (creating together) and symbiogenesis (becoming together). As science advances more into the quantum world, previous ideas of objectivity and of a world being divided into things, being separate, are challenged. Karen Barad speaks of intra-action: an entanglement so deep that relationships precede things. In other words, physically speaking: there is no distance (Barad 2007: 141).
As our understanding of who we are expands, "WE" encompasses far more than humans alone. Our bodies are diasporic, molecular, tentacular. Our borders are porous. Rain touches every-side of every-thing, the air touches the body inside and outside. These musings no longer remain solely in the philosophical realm. They call us to confront the realities of the Anthropocene, the guilt and grief accompanying the impending sixth mass extinction and potential annihilation of our species.
But how does one even begin doing that? Following Weber, I would argue that in order to face what is to come, we must learn how to love. For Weber, love is an act of “truly encountering another”, it is an active engagement that demands vulnerability and risk (Weber 2017: 214). He describes an ecology of desire, attraction and touch, where being and dying in the world is a profoundly erotic experience.
Life desires to happen and as Weber claims “we unfold our deeply sensitive and expressively poetic existence as a feeling part of an organic whole” (Weber 2017, 34). He implies that our sense-making processes ought to make space for sensing.
The ontological shift I am describing entails two central ideas: recognising our mutual entanglement with the environment and our kinship with all beings and becoming aware that climate chaos is something we too are going through and need to find loving strategies that support us in dealing with it.
So, what’s art got to do with it
Art serves as an imaginative, playful and limitless exercise on empathy, enabling us to connect deeply with the natural world, to rely on creativity to challenge the rigidity of our worldviews and gather the courage to address the tragic nature of the environmental crisis we are going through. In the following paragraphs I will analyse two artworks, Resisting Extinction by Body Cartography Project and Songs from the Compost by Eglė Budvytytė as examples of ways art might be able to inspire the ontological shift I have been describing, and support us in reframing climate chaos as an opportunity to “die well and fail imaginatively” (Akomolafe 2019, accessed 26.07.23).
Songs from the Compost: A crack in a rock, a crack in the narrative
Departing from the works of biologist Lynn Margulis and writer Octavia Butler, Eglė Budvytytė and her multispecies collaborators present a love letter to the relationships and forms of intimacies between all forms of life. Dancing in the spaces between poetry, music, video and performance, the film Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars, softly yet undeniably guides our attention to the power of interconnectedness. Stones, humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi are all at the epicentre of this work. Bodies in the process of becoming other, almost hybrids, more-or-less human -but not quite, are sharing space/time and sensing through existence together with the lichen forest and sand dunes. These bodies are rid of their verticality and its acquired efficiencies and come to negotiate new configurations. “How does such a body experience gravity?” is the question ringing in my head as the sensations of moving in sand, water and lichen inhabit my body through kinaesthetic empathy -a sign of recognition of myself in these hybrids.
This experience of co-sensing is at the heart of the film’s success in blurring the divide between human and other: Songs from the Compost opens up space for me to recognise myself into the other and thus questions the human hubris toward animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi; not through intellect, but through the senses. These bodies engage in a glorious process of decomposition, giving way and fuel for other lifeforms to bloom. I witness how “metabolism transforms matter into our collective body” (Weber 201: 59); it is utterly erotic. Meanwhile, having gone through a process of “alienisation”, Eglė’s voice with the help of voice-altering technologies, introduces voices of non-human creatures performing what she calls their “sweet and erotic revenge on the human race” (LCI 2021, accessed 25.07.2023). The soundtrack lures the viewer into a radical perspective shift.
I’m stretching time in your spine so long so
long so long so long
she will take care of you, she will fuck your past
a crack in the rock, a crack in the narrative
Eglė sheds light on the interconnectedness, disintegration, and decay inherent in all living entities, emphasising the importance of intertwined networks that unite human and non-human beings.
This entanglement goes beyond the poetic realm: The costumes used in the film are themselves a product of collaboration with the non-human: an ecological acheiropoieta(Groom, 2021: 86-90), where artistic agency is shared with the more-than-human entities. Eglė sings of symbiosis while engaging with sympoiesis to arrive at a celebration of symbiogenesis.
Resisting Extinction: The (r)evolution will be sensed
Rooted in eco-somatic practices, the experiential performance Resisting Extinction offers practices for living and dying together on a damaged earth. The performance always takes place outside, in an intimate entanglement with the ecosystem of the site it is hosted in and “invites us to not only look forward but to look around and notice what we are losing”(Resisting Extinction, accessed 19.07.2023). It unfolds as a series of three experiences:
The weather walk
“As dancers, we work from a belief in movement as transformation. We know that when you move, shit changes. You change yourself.”(Rehberg 2021, accessed 26.07.2023)
The weather walk is a one-on-one performance journey. I am taken on a transformative walk, invited to play and sense my body in relation to all other bodies. Each walk is a singularity: a unique meeting between performer, audience and place. My walks led me to dance with mosquitoes, engage in a blind hunt in the forest, relate to trees through my verticality and breath, meet the richness of decomposition, smell, taste, play, laugh, cry -fall in love. It was a space for co-sensing, for tuning-in-with the natural world, and for moving beyond mere sympathy or intellectual understanding. Such practices encourage a profound engagement, prompting us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the ecosystem and our responsibilities towards it.
The missing
In this part the audience is “set free” within the landscape, with the instructions to be with what is present and what isn’t. “An invisible performance that flickers on the periphery of our consciousness where critically endangered multi-species beings haunt the landscape”(Resisting Extinction, accessed 19.07.2023). A chance to share space/time with otherness, to recognise and build connections with the unseen and the unnoticed in the physical and sensory capacity of our social bodies. An encounter with magic in the smallest and the most unimportant, magic being an “ontology of the unexpected – an ongoing ethical engagement with intersection points where a world dances in and out of virtualities”(Akomolafe 2016, accessed 28.07.2023)
Dying and decomposing practices
For the last part of Resisting Extinction, the group gathers to decide which of the three potential climate realities to practise; rehearsing death and decomposition together. As I lie on the earth, giving in to gravity, a detailed narration of the physiological processes of death in the chosen climate scenario, which seamlessly flows into the subsequent process of decomposition. For Bieringa this is somatisation, a process of understanding that happens at the cellular level. (Bieringa et.al. 2023 accessed 26.07.2023). Here is an opportunity to meet the e-motions running through my body, a body already sensitised and tickled by the two preceding experiences. Grief, joy, relief, hope, fear I taste as I am becoming undone by a river of my own tears. “Your death is a process, not an event'', I am reminded. My death is the continuation of the processes that have kept me alive. I am inseparable to everything. There is solace in the continuation of life beyond our own.
Resisting Extinction supports us in staying with the trouble and to tenderly address our collective guilt and anticipatory grief, providing a safe space to grapple with the difficult emotions that arise when confronting the realities of climate chaos and understanding what learning to die means: “serving the unfolding of enlivenment, of the self-in-connection.” (Weber 2017: 72)
Love in the time of climate chaos: a conclusion (?)
“In the beginning, there was chaos.”
The reason I prefer the term chaos as opposed to catastrophe, emergency or disaster is that in a very poetic way, chaos implies a beginning. In ancient Greek mythology, the world began from Chaos, when the big deities started uncontrollably falling in and making love.
Facing the reality of climate chaos means understanding that it is not a matter of fixing; the world does not need me, you, us to fix it. It is a matter of caring for timelines beyond our own, of “integrating with a wider metabolism, with a much longer temporality than [our] human body” (d’Emilia et.al. 2020), of finding our new gods in the bushes, the soil, the weather, of learning to be in the “end of our world”, of learning how to meet grief with love.
Here lies an opportunity to dance with the chaos, to transform our narratives, and to co-create a future that cherishes life with or without humans.
Footnotes
The term climate chaos is an alternative wording for the climate crisis used by Bayo Akomolafe at the Biotoopia conference, Tallinn 2023.
The BodyCartography Project, founded by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad in 1998, is an interdisciplinary performance art initiative. It explores the connections between the human body, movement, and environment, seeking to reawaken embodiment, relationships, and presence through live performances and audience participation.
The relationship between humans and bacteria is only one of countless examples of symbiosis within our ecosystem. Lichens are another one. “Organisms are already ecosystems operating within ecosystems”, transforming sunlight into flesh, flesh into other flesh: “a completely earthly, material sharing of the same substance” (Weber 2017: 33)
The term intra-action was first coined by philosopher, sociologist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces (Barad, 2007: 141) in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably.
When attempting to enter the ecological discourse, one inevitably confronts the concept of the Anthropocene—a geological era in which human presence and its production have shaped a distinctive geological layer, officially dated to start in 1945. But it is a lot more than a layer in the ground: the Anthropocene holds the reflection of our relationship with everything that we don’t recognise as kin, it is the stories we have been telling ourselves about ourselves, it is how we identify. (Morton 2021)
Donna Haraway refers to speculative fabulation: a "mode of attention, a theory of history and a practice of worlding" (Donna Haraway, 2016: 213). It is rooted in everyday storytelling practices and forms a crucial tool for imagining worlds that can be radically different from the one we know.
Biologist Lynn Margulis in her theory of symbiogenesis emphasises that bacteria and other microorganisms actively participated in shaping the Earth, and helped create conditions suitable for life (e.g., almost all eukaryotes require oxygen, and only developed after cyanobacteria have produced enough atmospheric oxygen). She also argues that these microorganisms still maintain current conditions and that they constitute a major component in Earth biomass.In the now generally accepted endosymbiotic theory, Margulis demonstrated that current plant cells resulted from the merging of separate ancestors
Octavia Butler, a pioneer in science fiction writing often writes interspecies intimacies into existence, offering a very tender and empathetic view on otherness, employed tropes of symbiosis, mutation, and hybridity to challenge hierarchies and categorisation. Her trilogy Lilith’s Brood (otherwise known as Xenogenesis), deals with yet another post-apocalyptic scenario, where an alien species has decided to invade earth and intervene with humanity’s tendency to self-destruct in exchange of the cultivation of interspecies love affairs and hybridization.
Lyrics from the soundtrack of the film Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars 2022 on Vimeo, accessed 20.07.2023)
Icons made without hands.
Amidst the initial Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns in 2020, while Budvytytė was in Amsterdam and production was on hold, the artist decided to bury garments and cloth in her studio garden. She invited the soil and its inhabitants to participate. After approximately six weeks, the fabrics bore markings of decomposition, giving rise to film costumes shaped beyond individual human authorship. (Groom 2021)
“In order to have a “one” you need to have at least a “two” and it’s never just one; becoming-with is the name of the game.”(Haraway 2016)
Eco-somatics is a dynamic approach to learning and living which utilises embodiment practices to build knowledge which can support our transformation to move from concern, to care, to action when it comes to the ecological crisis. (Rehberg 2021, accessed 26.07.2023)
The phrase "Staying with the Trouble" in Donna Haraway's book refers to a call for engagement and active participation with the complexities and challenges of the contemporary world, particularly concerning environmental issues and the relationships between humans and other species. Instead of turning away from these problems or seeking simple solutions, Haraway encourages readers to confront the entangled and messy realities of our existence and to remain committed to finding ways to make a positive impact despite the difficulties.
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