katherinemacbride

[katherinemacbride]

GHOST + Tender Center Study Group: Reading and…(Rotterdam, 2019/2020)

This text is also available as a captioned video with sound. https://vimeo.com/533486814

 The reading group is small: each time around ten people come, some returning, others new, an accumulation that fits round the pink and green and yellow table. We’re reading Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, little chunks of poetic density that build world-making thinking. I imagine him carefully choosing his words, fostering their multiple meanings, crafting the fluid, viscous opacity. I see pleasure and care, by which I mean care as worry, want, attention, and protection. “[T]hinking needs care…and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake,” wrote Christina Sharpe in In the Wake, her work on the reverberations of anti-Blackness. This is a call to read with feet and fingers and all the skin between.

I first watched Manthia Diawara’s film Edourard Glissant: One World in Relation soon after I started listening out for Glissant’s writing. When my ears were open, it formed a connective ocean of reading touching self-organised spaces, communities reflexively building tools, academics with epistemological heartaches, and art organising, with either abolitionist or appropriative ends. The film shapes a piece of methodological ground, something that holds in motion.

Diawara and Glissant cross the Atlantic Ocean on a cruise ship and walk on Martinique. They have one long conversation, or many conversations, depending on how you think about time and ends and beginnings. The edited fifty minutes offer a viewer a qualitative possibility of understanding Glissant’s work in a highly accessible form, as if his thought were a character in the film. 

Around that time, I was reading Daniel Stern’s elaboration of a therapeutic method based on staying with what he called “present moments,” fragments of relation experienced as “now” where meaning is consciously or unconsciously made. A structured interview repeatedly parsing a thirty to sixty second piece of someone’s everyday experience can hold the density of the person and introduce therapeutic themes meaningful to them that would more frequently be opened with a biographical conversation. Parsing the same material, working through a different register or mode on each pass – affect/movement/cognition/emotion/feeling – supports approaching and sitting with parts of experience it's harder to stay close to. The chosen material is so everyday and seemingly simple that it’s not as initially threatening as investigating a theme or event that is already narrativised. This supports the staying close, the sitting with. The whole structure is a Möbius binding of care and therapeutic possibility where “moments of meeting” – transformation – can occur.

Both of these methods – interview as filmmaking, interview as healing – perform a fractal thinking. The smaller carries the larger, the smaller contains the larger, the smaller is the larger. A relation of compression and expansion. What is being compacted isn’t forced to lose parts, or the uncertain but co-constituting space between those parts. The density is just still there, no matter how small the scale goes. To feel another part of the fractal, imagine holding diamond in one hand and coal in the other, and feel the extractive double helix of the histories of geology and capitalist value burying death and trauma in the carbon atoms. For much of the film, Diawara and Glissant are passing through the space of Middle Passage, the sea that holds particulate memory in its eternal movement and burnt carbon in its acidity. 

Glissant describes his concept of opacity with broccoli. He doesn’t like broccoli. Why is an opacity to him, he just knows he doesn’t like it. Neither the other parts of himself nor other people who may find this preference opaque and seek reasoning for it need to be given clarity. Other people do like broccoli, and that’s ok. This opacity is the basis for an ethics of relation.

We can only trust that the complexity of someone’s experience, and what they know about, can be held enough in a conversation for someone else to be able to understand something of it. Can only trust that this inevitable partiality, this edit, this mis/understanding that may occur for the listener is enough. Must trust that what is opaque also constitutes what is transparent or possible to get. This is a call to responsibility.

In Portuguese, the verb “ficar” is used, amongst other things, for “to stay” or “to remain” (I stayed at home) and something like “to become/to get/to end up” (I got wet, I got angry, I got drunk). It can do this because it has multiple forms that work on subjects and objects in different ways. In “to become/to get/to end up,” it is a copulative form, linking things, gathering mass around a subject without the need for an object. Sometimes, I translate this sense into English as “to get.” In English, “to get” is also used as a passive auxiliary for things being done by unclear subjects (the bed got made, I got found out); for straight up mercantile receiving of nouns, property (I got a book at the library, I got dinner); and for understanding: Do you get it? Eu fiquei. Remain. Get different. Hold. In motion.

What I don’t understand is present in what I do. This is a call to responsibility. Experience is made of understanding, misunderstanding, not understanding, and overstanding in its different Black and white etymologies. The moment of vibration. The moment of listening. The different feels of time passing at different scales and simultaneous possibilities.

In the reading group, we read aloud. Music. Reading in unison, we don’t take in much meaning but focus hard on the circle round the table, keep time, hold ourselves back from speeding up too much, still racing. Reading in turn, we go paragraph by paragraph. Some read smoothly, some bumpily, different decisions each time as to footnotes, pronunciation, and volume. Some prefer to listen and not voice. 

A person holding a large parcel stops and looks in the window. They ask about the space, note the website, and leave. They come bundling back and say they will join. An older couple arrive, they read about it on an LGBTQI++ listings page. Someone travels from afar to be seen in the clothes that fit how they feel. A neighbour comes to feel more comfortable than in other places. People are gentle with one another, make tea and conversation, make the space.

The group is developing its own structures. Asking questions. Sharing information about related subjects. Speaking quietly. Bringing different life experiences to the reading, thinking about it in relation to colonialism here. We’re speaking English so we talk about this awkward tool that lets us share here. We talk about the Dutch hospitality of speaking English that carries within and around it quiet hostility or open racism depending on skin colour. 

The group gathers bodies: non-binary, female-identifying, pregnant, chronically ill, neurodiverse, white, mestiza, brown. The early evening timing and small group attracts people who can’t stay up late or socialise in large numbers. Everyone came alone and is here together. 

A reading group is a piece of punctuation where relations can grow; it’s not a set of parentheses but could be if parentheses could contain infinity. Commas can form parentheses around the words or break the words into an infinite parenthesis around the point, a black hole. They accumulate matter. Commas make pauses, connections, gaps, breaks – moments where what can’t be contained in the language meets the words on the page, reminding the reader of what is there in opacity. Commas gently and violently pin transparency to what can’t be known. They collapse and explode simultaneously.

Thank you to S, who was there and is no longer here.

References

Diawara, Manthia. Édourard Glissant: One World in Relation. K’a Yéléma Productions, 2010. Distributed by Third World Newsreel.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Stern, Daniel. The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton, 2004

[katherinemacbride]

Non-extractive care

Non-extractive care: care that replenishes, maintains, and sustains all forms of life and matter to live well-enough. This idea of non-extractive care itself came from a reading together of Macarena Gómez-Barris’s work on queer decolonial femme resistances to extraction (2017), María Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on speculative care ethics (2017), and Silvia Federici’s work on primitive accumulation and social reproduction (2004).

This non-extractive care means not imagining or assuming one kind of being or one mode of existing at the center of our practices. It is practicing knowing that everyone is different and has different and dynamic needs; these differences are what connect us as we journey into non-extractive modes of caring. Two warnings: thinking that one practice or context can care for all the different needs is inevitably exclusionary; and trying to imagine what others need for them without ongoing engagement and collaboration with them, and without a full awareness that your needs are tied into theirs, will inevitably reproduce exclusionary logics and assumptions.

This non-extractive care is relational, messy, and cuts through all forms of life and matter. Practicing non-extractive care begins in our immediate contexts, but each immediate context is eventually connected to every other immediate context through the relations of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (following bell hooks’ descriptive formulation) and through the inseparability and interdependency of all the earth’s ecosystems. Practicing non-extractive care requires ongoing awareness that each of our immediate and locally specific contexts has differing impacts on the interdependent web of contexts.

This non-extractive care requires listening in order to co-create practices of solidarity, support, and learning across contexts. It recognizes that the vast complexity of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy poses challenges to thinking and acting and proposes listening to those embedded in other contexts as a necessary step in working together in and across difference.

This non-extractive care is sharing, which is replenishing, redistributing, and making reparations. For many reading this text, non-extractive care means contributing more and extracting less.

This non-extractive care is an infinite ethico-political process of co-maintaining the present to co-create the future. It is feeling through and working with our shared yet differing responsibilities and holding each other accountable to them. This maintenance is dynamic not static.

This non-extractive care is poly-temporal, which means attending to those who were and will be as well as those who are now. The caring practices of those who came before made our existence. Our caring practices in the present create the possibilities of existence for those coming after. 

This non-extractive care involves repairing and healing damage, neglect, violence, and pain.

This non-extractive care is ongoing and requires work and feelings, attempts and failures, and finding ways to sustain and continue. It is difficult and can involve conflict; cause harm in its messiness, which then needs to be repaired; feel boring and laborious because it has been systemically devalued; feel joyful; involve doing less and more, which can feel confusing; involve noticing, which can feel painful and delightful; feel uncertain; feel constraining; feel improvised; and feel endless – because it is.

Prompts to practice 

The following prompts are intended as a starting point to guide reflection on where you are now, and to identify actions you can take to transition towards non-extractive care in your everyday practices. You can use them alone, with people you share communities with, or with people in your workplace. As you use them, keep thinking about what alliances and coalitions you are fostering and supporting.

Reflection: Who is centered, intentionally or unintentionally, in your working practices?

Who and what is paid or unpaid?

Who and what is and is not acknowledged?

Who and what are the imagined and the actual producers, participants, and publics?

Who and what are your collaborators?

What relations to time are privileged?

What are the power structures involved in how you or your organization work? For example, team hierarchies, decision making processes, financial structures, funding sources.

If you have an accountability structure, what do they hold you accountable to? And who and what are part of that structure? An accountability structure could be your board, your mentors, your community, or your dependents.

Action: What could you change today, next week, next year to move towards an active practice of non-extractive care?

Reflection: How do you sustain yourself and where do those resources come from?

Who and what is involved in your supply chain? Are they able to sustain themselves?

Who and what is embedded in the historical accumulation of value that you or your organization has today? Historical accumulation of value is present in the the region and country you are in, your body and its relation to other bodies, and in your degree of access to financial, educational, or state resources.

Do you recognize the emotional work that keeps everything going? Who and what does that work? How much of it do you do?

Action: What could you change today, next week, next year to move towards an active practice of non-extractive care?

Reflection: Where could you redistribute surplus and divest from extractive practices to transition towards non-extractive care?

What are the effects further along the supply chain of the tools and supports you use? In other words, what do you do now that has longer term effects that deplete others? If you don’t know, how can you find out? Tools and supports could be: financial services, energy supply, reproductive labour, IT services, consumable goods, building infrastructure.

What do you do now that you don’t need to do?

What do you not do now that you could begin right away?

How could you practice listening?

How can you keep on working on the power structures that are involved in how you or your organization work? 

How can you work, and keep working, on repairing?

What could be the impact of your actions in one hundred years’ time?

Action: What could you change today, next week, next year to move towards an active practice of non-extractive care?

[katherinemacbride]

Slow Burn: Diary of a changing institution

(K MacBride and Miriam Wistreich)

…to maintain is also to keep buoyant; to maintain one's mood could be described as buoying oneself up, keeping oneself or someone else afloat during difficult times. Maintaining that the Earth is round when it looks flat is about upholding an idea, defending, and affirming it when it is challenged or attacked, raising its profile when it has slipped off the agenda. To maintain is to underpin, or prop up from below, to hold up when something or someone is flagging. The time of maintenance lies therefore at the intersection between the lateral axis of stumbling blindly on, and the vertical axis of holding up, orientating us towards a future, even when that future is uncertain, or may not be our own.

(Lisa Baraitser, 2017, Enduring Time. Bloomsbury: London. p. 53)

 For more than twenty years Hotel Maria Kapel has been an artists' residency, cinema, and contemporary art space in Hoorn, a town thirty minutes from Amsterdam. The venue, which is located in an impressive sixteenth century chapel, started in 1983 as an artists' initiative in the abandoned Maria Kapel and subsequently grew into what it is today: a publicly funded institution with national and international connections. In 2019, after the departure of Creative Director Irene de Craen who had led the institution through a period of (still ongoing) professionalisation, the board of Hotel Maria Kapel instigated a "year of reflection and reorientation" for which they hired an editorial committee consisting of artists Griet Menschaert and Maja Bekan, and curator Miriam Wistreich. A mix of artistic research and curatorial experimentation, the editorial committee's 2020 programme Slow Burn focuses on questions of care to channel institution building and its entailing questions into HMK's residency and exhibition programme. Through six thematic chapters (space, navigation, work, endurance, community, and time) the team of HMK, with its artists in residence, are trying to understand what it means to practice care — for our artists, our institution, our team, and our publics. Who do we care about and for? How can we qualify care through feminist politics and avoid the pitfalls of caring badly or caring too much? Is this even possible and what happens when we fail? And ultimately: how can we build practices and spaces of care within the limits of an exploitative system with which we are all complicit?

This text was co-written in June 2020 by Miriam Wistreich (Creative Director, HMK) and Katherine MacBride after the latter's residency at HMK. The point of departure for the writing process was a set of journals written by the HMK team — Annelien de Bruin (Coordinator), Miriam, and Rik Dijkhuizen (Communications Manager) — during March 2020, recording their experiences of running the organisation. This exercise was intended to form part of HMK's research into its own working practices, but since the Dutch government's measures to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic came into effect in March, the journals also offer insight into sudden changes in modes of working and the possibilities and challenges this opened up in a small team.

To write this text, Miriam and Katherine drew on four recurring themes that emerged from the journals: buoyancy, stress, structure, and listening. Each wrote two sections of what follows, drawing on differing positions in relation to HMK and wider experiences of collective work; some are descriptive, some propositional. Different voices inhabit the text together. The section "Stress" is formed of direct quotes from the journals that are used here with permission.

Buoyancy

Buoying one another along and up, on the surface, in the air, not drowning or falling, afloat; maintained in space and time. Vulnerable and precarious, buoyancy is a never ending processual task. The buoy will need new air pumped in, its rope replacing, eventually the anchor will rust. Someone will attend to these things, keep them maintained, as long as the buoy and the buoyancy of those who depend on it are deemed necessary, or as long as the maintaining attention itself can be kept buoyant. Otherwise the buoy might degenerate or disappear, bringing risk to those who depend on its buoy function for their own buoyancy. Unplanned parts of the structure, like the algae and small bivalves who grow on the rope, might outlive the maintenance energies, for they are not dependent on the buoy's intended function but will too find their environment disrupted and at risk as the buoy degrades in time. Who is maintaining the buoy in your collective work? Who do you know and not know that depend on it?

Stress

There are not enough hours in the day (and I really value sleeping).

Finished translation of project plan. In the afternoon I had a migraine.

Tired from yesterday, my other job ran late, the day started with a feeling of being behind, underperforming, lacking in discipline and efficiency. I pour myself a coffee before our weekly meeting. 

I enter in a state of near panic, thinking of a reprimanding email and all of the funding I am behind on. I do seven day work weeks at the moment and am running behind on deadlines in all of my jobs (currently only around three employers) and feel I am underperforming everywhere. 

Institutional trauma is carried in the bodies of the workers.

Things have been evolving rapidly. People are falling ill, we are advised to keep distance, work from home. We close HMK. My friends and community experience the consequences without delay: cancelled jobs, plans put on hold. Over the course of one day, my teaching jobs fall through, my side gig is cancelled, my exhibition is postponed indefinitely, my writing jobs are put on hold. I am tense thinking about them. I reach out to precarious friends (work, mental stability etc.). I go to bed exhausted.

I have a toothache and have to go to the hospital. I go to bed with a numb mouth and exhausted brain.

I spend the day feeling stressed about how to live up to everything that is demanded from me at work, from friends, as a person. I am overwhelmed and unable to focus. I feel lonely, who will be there to comfort me when I collapse?

I lose the day to a migraine.

I finish the day dancing alone in my room. I chose UB40 to get good vibes in my body. 

Structure

We maintain the chapel every Thursday, 15.00. We sort through twenty years of paperwork, two years of exhibition materials, wood everywhere, bags of plastic. We haven't seen the mice yet but we know they are there.

We invent meeting protocols.

We mop the floors before opening hours.

We sing together every month.

We disagree on the relationship between structure and freedom and the virtues of each.

Sometimes we don't know what we're doing. Other times we know really well.

A score to prepare listening attention in a meeting

At the last meeting responsibilities for the preparation, happening, and follow-up for this meeting were shared out. These vary for each meeting group but probably cover the following areas (broken down into separate tasks so one person does not cover an entire  category by themselves): admin (reminders, agenda, minutes), group process (facilitation, timekeeping, attending to unspoken dynamics), reproductive labour (attending to bodily needs of everyone, including the space). Responsibilities rotate for each meeting regardless of role hierarchies outside meetings.

Someone, or everyone, brings food to the meeting so no one is hungry.

Adjust the temperature. Human bodies do not have universal experiences of hot/cold.

Arrange enough seating. Can everyone in the group sit on the same kind of seats?

Adjust the lighting — bright enough to see each other but not so bright that those with light sensitivity are uncomfortable.

Prepare drinks that everyone can drink.

Develop a group agreement on start and end times based on the needs and capacities of the group. For example, people with caring responsibilities, health issues, or precarious work (often this is the whole group) might not be able to stay over time, or arrive exactly on time.

Develop a practice of checking in at the start of the meeting. This gathers the capacities, needs, and complexity of each individual and draws them together into the group.

If the meeting has an agenda, someone reads it aloud. Agree together what is possible to address in this meeting. It is important to develop a practice of setting realistic agendas over time.

During the meeting, listen: to the threads of the content; to your own thoughts before you speak them, considering if they need to have space in the available time; to learn about processes you are not actively involved in and modes that feel different or difficult for you; for feedback from others; to moods; to the unspoken.

Record something of the meeting so that the people who cannot be present, which is usually some people, can clearly understand something of what happened.

A short reflection on the effects of journaling within the organisation

The journals were shared between the members of the team and discussed during weekly meetings. Journals are tools for self-reflection, channels for venting, and traditionally also containers for secrets and contradictory, sometimes shameful, emotions. Within the HMK team, the journals functioned as access tools into each other's thoughts and allowed conversations to arise that would not otherwise have been given space in a hierarchical, professional context. It allowed the team to discuss subjects such as fears connected to work, differences in coping strategies, levels of engagement and excitement and the histories leading to those emotions, and the pressure we put on ourselves and others. Ultimately the journals led to increased vulnerability and openness within the small team, no doubt aided by a simultaneous feeling of breakdown and dissolution of boundaries between work and life caused by COVID-19 measures.

published https://newiseverything.com/slow-burn-diary-of-a-changing-institution.html

[katherinemacbride]

Sticky Metaphors: The Matter of Meaning

Exposition

In living with an awareness of the entanglement of matter and meaning, words have consequences. If you directly translate a metaphor from another language into the one we are speaking, chances are it will carry the shape of the idea but not the historical context. Metaphors reveal connections that have become embedded within a culture to the point of passing unremarked.

One day in the past I wrote urgently: I will be as attentive as possible to my use of metaphor in my writing. I will be mindful of the implicit ideologies embedded into certain metaphors and try to invent alternatives. I came to this writing with a fear of metaphor, grounded in feminist critique of the patriarchal and imperialist power of language as representation. However, while language is indeed an ineffective tool in conveying the complexity of the material world, it is also a tool that I have. Rather than disavowing metaphor, I will seek to engage with it creatively, engaging with its etymological root of “carrying across.”

Metaphors have several components: the “tenor” is the concept and the “vehicle” is the image that carries it across. Leaning too hard into the vehicle of metaphors risks cutting away the tenor, the weight, of what they’re describing. My favourite writing often asks the words to hold tightly to the dual roles and responsibilities of tenor and vehicle, to pack a tense density into metaphors that troubles the insistently not-yet-dead Western notion of the separability of matter and meaning. Leaning into metaphor so the weight of the tenor holds your body in place in the vehicle makes some of the co-constitution tangible; what’s present, what’s excluded, and what’s cutting the present-and-excluded together and apart. It collapses some of that distance. Both/And. Carry over.

Cutting together and apart (entanglement)

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2007) describes how matter and meaning are entangled. Each apparatus – boundary-making practice – makes “agential cuts.” Barad is initially writing about observing electrons in the lab; how they can behave differently depending on which apparatus is being used to observe them. But she extends her point that there is no “outside” from which to observe “objectively” into a call to responsibility based on the collapsing together of ethics, ontology, and epistemology: matter is performative and discourse is material. Each cut of a boundary-making practice into matter-discourse excludes certain possibilities in order to make others intelligible. An electron appears as a wave or a particle or both, depending how it is observed. 

To give something a name or a category is a boundary making practice. A name brings different possibilities of meaning nearer and farther. A category formation limits or enables, effecting those captured within it and those excluded beyond its boundary.

There is no separability between the boundary-making practice that cuts, the intelligibility it produces, and the matter that uses this intelligibility to make meaning. What the boundary-making practice excludes – cuts out, cuts away – always remains present, even if it is not knowable to the intelligibility it co-constitutes, cuts together. Barad calls this “exteriority-within.” 

Some humans use managerial language to hide or elide the violence of boundary-making cuts that deny the intricacies of interdependency and its responsibilities. In this system of globalised racial capitalism, names like “detention centre” or “managed extraction” mean toxicity and death for many to pay for profit and property for some.

Transformation-in-relation (working models)

In the week-long residential workshop “Mobilis in Mobili: On Space, Time, Motion, and Forces,” organised by philosopher and physicist Gabriel Catren for non-physicists and physicists alike [1], participants use language to make transitions and translations. We move between thinking in spacetimes that feel different to the experience of being on Earth, and the tactile and conversational space of the room where we are learning while sitting on sofas, listening to music in the breaks while birds look in the window.

Wild use of metaphors abounds over meals as people who speak humanities try and integrate maths and physics into everyday speech. During the day “geometry” was a schema of axioms; now it means “a mode of arrangement or relations.” I have struggled with visualising the matrices used to plot the four dimensions of objects in motion. Over dinner I start to use “matrix” to mean "complex field of relations.” The poetry of “worldline” attracts like a gravitational pull. I think it means the totality of all of the positions a particle holds in space and time while it holds to one identity; here it speaks to the stories of matter and the paths I track for orientation through spacetime I have learned how to feel in limited ways. The word “intuition” gains density and strength; a valuable, and fallible, guiding tool that connects to non-linguistic ways of knowing that stretch space and time. A question that’s used frequently to open conversation is, “What is your intuition on that?”

In this multi-disciplinary space people listen carefully to each other and ask thoughtful questions trying to understand one another’s ways of doing things. These conversations happen while bodies cook or stack the dishwasher repeatedly; side by side joint attention on an external object can make it easier to share verbally. Eye contact checks crucial points of meaning but bodies provide most of what is necessary. 

Someone explains to me that mathematicians do not have to speak great English. There is less pressure on words because they can use mathematical formulae. It can hold working models for to all who know it regardless of what other languages they think in. This form of abstraction holds its poetics differently than words – the expressive texture isn’t as loose, the axioms are firmer, the parameters of the abstract space are more transparent – but it’s no less weird or wild.

In this learning space, the workshop leader uses working models instead of metaphors. We’re thinking beyond the visualisable dimensions and properties of space and time on Earth so we stay grounded with thought experiments where dimensions and properties of space and time off-Earth can be broken down into proofs. There is a train leaving the train station. Inside the train there is a clock and there is an infinite array of clocks all along the train tracks. The train and the station and the clocks are all in a vacuum…

Interlude (unnaming) 

We met in the overburdened garden. One of us was already not comfortable identifying as he and had yet to find an articulation for this feeling, but soon would move quickly through they into she. Another of us was freshly out of a long-term relationship feeling the pressure of liminal fertility. One was me, she then, not now. Summer and sage stroked our skin and the resting containers of sun tea. We read, sat beside one another, with texts laid out on the horizontal planes around and between us.

Reading beside [2], not through or into, just with. Looking for ways to talk, without names [3], about what ways of knowing might be possible through the end of the world [4]. We were trying to apply our words differently to the world, to not rely on the pieces of code that we’d built in our schools, our friendships, our amniotic sacs, our visits to government offices, our experiences of being employed when that was still a thing, in all the times we’d done something we didn’t want because someone else did, and in all the times we’d made someone do something they didn’t want but we did. We were searching for a metaphor-less methodology for collective thinking. Reading transversally, without a singular guiding line, without shortcut words to make maps of shortcut worlds, we fumbled.

Transformation-in-relation (fermentation) 

Fermentation is a metabolic process where one compound is broken down through anaerobic respiration into other compounds. For example, a carbohydrate can be fermented into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Fermentation has been used figuratively for a long time to speak about activity and agitation – passion – usually now in relation to the production of ideas and cultural objects. The word “ferment” itself comes directly from the Latin: fermentum for the noun, fermentare for the verb. This latter may itself be a contraction from the Latin verb fervere (to boil or foam). The Proto-Indo-European root of fervere is bhreu-, which I speak in words for food, fire, water, and feelings: bread, bratwurst, braze, burn (the Scottish word for stream), brew, barmy, brood, embroil.

Columbian artists’ collective Laagencia have a practice of creating open programmes called Escuelas de Garaje. The event I write about here, Escuela de Garaje – vol. Fermentation, took place in August 2020 in and around an art space in Rotterdam called Rib [5]. 

We were sitting, standing, moving in the long art space in the neighbourhood where many artists were sitting in subsidised real estate. Some in the neighbourhood were building mutual aid, open-source infrastructures, and friendships with neighbours who weren’t artists; some were grumbling. For the first time, the window to the long art space invited entry. Laagencia had painted basic information across the large shop window about what was happening inside, when, and said that anyone could join. They kept the door open and played music out into the street: salsa, cumbia, reggaeton. People who wouldn’t usually come in stopped by to listen and chat.

Fermentation was encouraged in weekly practices of reading, open kitchen/bread-making, and visiting places together. Laagencia’s gatherings were accumulating a larger, looser collective to mind out for the fostered bacterial cultures. Microbial life was being centred and given human attention. Already-ongoing neighbourhood activities of food production and anti-gentrification organising were also being centred [6].

I joined for “fermentreadings.” People talked, listened, settled, stirred, ate, drank, read, together. Someone brewed coffee. Someone sliced bread. Someone talked about how they made the drink in the bottle they held. Someone put a piece of electronic equipment into a mason jar of polluted river water to learn if microbes might grow in the relation of these substances. Someone cooked sourdough pancakes with leftover starter on a hotplate. Someone washed cutlery. The long art space was filled with life. The table gave bottles and jars of differently coloured liquids and pickled foods; hand-written labels. The reading happened incrementally but non-linearly, by consent, each chunk digested slowly with conversation about lived experiences and effervescent connecting of ideas and matter.

In the practice of Laagencia, fermentation is happening literally and figuratively. They activate multiple processes of transformation-in-relation that remind the humans engaging in these processes of the fragility of the epistemological structures we have been given at school that prop up the state we are standing in, feed its extractive economy, and, in this Dutch neighbourhood six meters below sea level, produce the very ground we are standing on.

Fermentation insists there are many ways of knowing and being that are not to do with profit and property. Bacterial boundary-making practices create possibilities that humans depend on for life. Around these processes of transformation and onto-epistemological humbleness, fermentation as metaphor supports the gathering of heterogenous groups through its affective power. In their self-published pamphlet Garage School Fermentation (2020), Laagencia write: “Through fermenting we learn that matter and metaphors can still be changed.”

Cutting together and apart (listening)

Listen to your body, to your dreams, to your intuition. Listen to the voices of your ancestors, to what the Earth is telling you. 

These are things some people say and other people understand but some people find troublesome. The trouble accumulates around the questions of whether listening is meant literally or figuratively, and where might the edges of literal or figurative be. In Western traditional thought, listening describes what happens when some humans perceive and understand sound. Often it is connected to the ears and the brain, sometimes to the body. But the separation of the senses into touch, taste, hearing, sight, smell (and the subsequent expanding list of nerve-neurology perception pathways with names like proprioception, pain reception, temperature sensing) is only one way of making this cut. 

As a thought experiment, imagine someone raised in a Western knowledge system who experiences the senses as separate and their body as autonomous and independent. Perhaps for this person, listening is a sensory modality where it is easier for them to experience themselves as porous in relation to other life, to feel that their body is an integrated system that cannot be disconnected from other systems. Perhaps this experience and the collapse of separation, autonomy, and independence it invokes is why sound is often gendered and racialised into noise or why sound is used so often as an instrument of torture [7].

Like sound, skin-to-skin touch of human hands is also sensed as an oscillating wave of vibration through the nervous system. Current ways of thinking say that what is being vibrated differs (air, flesh) and the nerves and brain region processing the vibration are different. But that is only one way of cutting this experience into intelligibility. A different cut, towards the category of the waveform rather than the parts of the human it is waving through, could say that what is happening in hearing and touch perception is more similar than different. With this cut, we’d need to find more words for what we experience when we listen to mechanical, electromagnetic, or gravitational waves as they move through us. 

But sticking with the cut of listening being about sound, we still grow complicating connective paths among what the cut has just separated. If listening is hearing – i.e. the sensing and perception of vibrating sound waves within a frequency range that stimulates the auditory apparatus of animals, plus the integration of what is being heard into a form of meaning (Oliveros, 2005) – then listening is an accumulation of experience and memory. 

But sound waves don’t only vibrate within the frequency range of the human auditory apparatus. Some humans learn to interpret technical instruments or the behaviour of non-human life and matter who do sense that frequency range. Listening here involves reading through the accumulation of memory and experience of a trained listener, like a seismologist or a cardiographer. But experience and memory (even only of sound) don’t only live in the brain; they live in the body and its environment, and through cultural and spiritual practices. What kind of listening listens to them?

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, makes this cut (2020): “…we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. And that’s really what I mean by listening.” 

If I wanted to propose a non-extractive and non-dominating listening then it would need to attend to and integrate what has happened and been repressed from experience and memory, and become aware of effects that are not compressed into a waveform but experienced or remembered in another way. Listening as a description of this more-than-sonic experience might become a temporary metaphor for the kinds of attention and awareness that English doesn’t have so many good names for, like how Fred Moten and Stefano Harney define hapticality in The Undercommons (2013, p. 98): “the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you.”

This is listening as poly-sensory, poly-temporal experience. The frame of this listening is understood differently than in Western scientific understandings of human hearing – listening involves listening to “sounds” that are not normatively “sounded,” and entities that do not produce sound in a normative way are entities one can listen to. It is possible to listen into times other than the present. This listening is a collective activity, in relation with others, although those others do not have to be humans; different forms of life and matter are interdependent and co-constitute the listening possibilities. Understanding is not the only intention and may well not be achievable. Listening to plural ontologies, epistemologies and cosmologies asks for learning from their plurality of stories, memories and experiences; things known and unknown; beliefs.

Coda

We slip into metaphors comfortably like worn-in shoes, borrowing their easy clarity. Metaphors can carry affective energy for gathering political collectivity to change practices of thinking and doing. They can connect actions and materials to ideas and feelings. Depending on how they are used, they can also conceal power. Leaning too hard into the vehicle risks losing the tenor. My metaphors are mixed and made in relation to yours so, how do we take care of them and mind where we are as we use them without fumbling too much? 

1 The workshop was held at Performing Arts Forum, France in September 2018. Performing Arts Forum is a building run on principles of self-organisation by members where individuals or groups may stay for relatively low cost. The reproduction and sustaining of this space by all those who inhabit it is a central aspect of spending time there. Sometimes people organise specific workshops there, such as this one, which are open to all who respond to the announcement.

2 One of the pieces of paper was a photocopy of page eight of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). There, she proposes “beside” as a prepositional relation that carries more plural (and spatial) possibilities than “beneath” or “beyond,” which invoke linear time through a focus on either origin or telos. In her argument, “beside” is non-dualistic, for multiple things can be beside each other and need not be equal, equivalent, or oppositional. So “beside” offers a mode with which to avoid the dualisms of a variety of linear logics, not only temporal ones. 

3 Other pieces of paper held a print out of Ursula K Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them,” a short story originally published in the New Yorker in 1985. The story describes the aftermath of a societal process of unnaming living beings from categorising nouns: “I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.”

4 Yet other pieces of paper held a printed-out scan of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World” (2014). That paper works through two questions: “Would the poet’s intention emancipate the Category of Blackness from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place, which is also the Black Feminist Critic worksite? Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing?”

5 Laagencia describe themselves as: “an office of art projects that promotes investigation and processes in art + education, stimulates debate on artistic and instituting practices, experimenting with different strategies and methodologies of work to propose formats of mediation, public programs in collaboration, self-publishing exercises, and alternative ways of doing with others…The project is made up of five artists, without any kind of hierarchy, all of them are directors, producers and participants.” https://laagencia.net/laagencia/ [K’s translation.]

6 It is beyond the scope of this text to adequately address the long-term gentrification of Rotterdam. Present in the events I describe are multiple complex local histories of the ways in which some artists have been willingly instrumentalised by the municipality in gentrification processes while others have been active in anti-gentrification movements, the particularities of European white supremacy in the Dutch context, and a regional experiment in running a municipality as a neoliberal form of service provider.

7 Noise is an imprecise category, with contextual meanings in different forms of practice or disciplines of knowledge. It has frequently been mobilised in multiple different ways as one side (bad) of a highly mobile (following the moving needs of a power structure) good/bad binary. Persons, beings, forms, or sounds can be coded as noisy following multiple logics of white supremacist imperialist patriarchal oppression. For just a few examples across a range of disciplines and oppressions see: Weheliye 2005, Kheshti 2015, Stoever 2016, Thompson 2017,  Steingo and Sykes 2019, Robinson 2020.

References

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 81–97.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Kheshti, Roshanak. Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “The Intelligence of Plants,” interview by Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett, WNYC Studios, February 25, 2016.

Laagencia. Garage School Fermentation. Self-published pamphlet. Rotterdam, August 2020.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “She Unnames Them.” New Yorker, January 21, 1985.

Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse, 2005.

Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Steingo, Gavin, and Jim Sykes, eds. Remapping Sound Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Stoever, Jennifer. The Sonic Colour Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Thompson, Marie. Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

[katherinemacbride]

letter from Rio

Rio de Janeiro, August 2019

Dear you,

I listened to a podcast yesterday with Kyla Schuller that helped me rethink the term “impression” in ways that feel super rich and will take their time to unfold. There isn’t space here to do justice to her work but let’s say she works carefully into biopolitics and the relation between constructions of sexual and racial difference. So, I’m calling these moments below impressions as I send them to you, but doing so mindfully, aware of their complexity and ongoing unfolding-ness in “my” body/the collective body, and consciously, aware of how all my words carry colonial matter.

A protest against educational cuts. The schoolteacher activist shouts into the camera: “A sea of people, mountains of people.” Clapping chants, samba bands, small children in school uniforms. A man holds aloft a copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Afterwards lesbian couples are kissing in the metro like at the protest about the investigation into the murder of Marielle Franco.

Colonisation, undigested. Caipirinha: drink; diminutive version of a word for country people; of Tupi origin meaning cutter of the forest. Popcorn baths and macerated herbs and bathing in the dawn with them to draw different energies towards you. Pesticides. Palestinian sweet limes are Persian lemons, green-coloured oranges are pear oranges, orange-coloured limes are Galician lemons, pomelos are thick skins and sharp centers. The global history of citrus cultivation; ancient varieties and colonial transpositions. Plate bananas, water bananas, bread bananas, earth bananas, honey bananas. High protein wild leaves of an invasive species called pray for us. Round root vegetables that clean the blood of fever. Deep fried pastries: wee salties.

Knowing all the lyrics to multiple songs. The crowd sings with the musicians of the roda de samba who sit round a table playing. Dancing, we complete the circle. A singer whose characters have mouths stuffed full of kisses and food and death; a song about racist fear projected onto hair. Elderly and teenage couples dancing in the shade of closed museums. “Daily singing helps you live longer”, she says, then holds my hands on her throat to help me understand where the vibrations should be coming from.

Fences and gates, foam on the bay. Photographs of electricity cable spaghetti in a favela used to illustrate an English-language art magazine article about an artist from the same favela; white gaze ‘realness’. Houses built ‘illegally’ on an ex-coffee plantation where first slaves then exploited wage labourers worked. Sewage infrastructure, or not; rooftop water tanks.

Gentrification is white supremacy. The colours of the samba school who won the carnival with a song honouring Afro-Brazilian women repeated in an artwork commenting on arts-led gentrification on the roof of a soon-to-close arts-led-gentrification-project museum. Houses built ‘illegally’ on a publicly owned hill when black workers were displaced to make room for grand boulevards; buildings were burned to force the displacement. More recently, the favela’s main square was destroyed for a world cup funicular that is indefinitely closed.

Violence, continuing. More people forcibly brought from Africa were disembarked here than at any other port in the Americas. The bodies of 150,000 people who died following the horrific journey are buried in a site the size of a house. The owners, on finding the remains while doing repairs, turned their home into a memorial and research center. The quays where millions of people were unloaded, held in fattening houses, and sold were later covered over for a royal parade. A grant from another country, with its own poor record of redressing the ongoing injustices rooted in slavery, paid for a sign marking an area of these recently uncovered quay stones. Nearby, the museum of tomorrow overlooks this past. The local quilombo community are still fighting for legal land rights.

Resistance. Different words, movement, nuance, and sensitivity for talking about race go with greater capacity for owning intersectional privileges. Ongoing generous conversations about trauma and violence and healing. A multilingual message thread where we’re all using different gender-neutral pronouns. The discussion where an academic talks about being security checked as she arrived tonight at this, her own workplace, and ex-students describe going to the bathroom together to protect themselves from institutional racism, and all talk of joy in collectivity and the black feminists who made roots and paths and ground that support the generations here. People talk matter-of-factly about being involved in struggles that will take multiple generations to work through. Intergenerational conversations with activists where complexity is understood and relations among words and bodies are attended to with care and multiple forms of deep intelligence. Precise verbs in everyday speech. Art performances of which the audience forms part; I am held, have my feet washed, share spoons. All these events addressing our inseparability through experiences that acknowledge the infinity of differences in the room.

Estou aprendendo... People and habits from this city have a name that means white man’s house in Tupi. Shining northern-European white as I am, the language I have isn’t enough, because, like all white northern Europeans I have so much to unlearn and relearn in addressing the ongoing colonial matrix. In Brazilian Portuguese continuous tenses hold multiple narratives. My prepositions are lacking so things connect in uncertain ways. One additional letter changes a word from touch to exchange.

The errors in this text live in “my” body. Everything else lives in the collective body. This text is written with the material support of the Mondriaan Fonds residency structure and the relational support of all at Capacete.

Abraços,

Katherine

originally published here: http://www.metropolism.com/nl/features/38954_postcard_from_rio_de_janeiro_artist_in_residence_2

[katherinemacbride]

AMOR/TORTURA

In Brazilian Portuguese there are two words for we. Nós is used to talk about a determinate group and a gente is used to talk about an indeterminate group. Often, a gente is also used to talk about a group that is in fact determined in some way but my intuition, as a learner, is that it leaves open the possibility of the group changing its boundaries and form, becoming something different while remaining a gente. A gente in this sense also means us. A gente literally translated would mean the people, not in the sense of the people united, that would be o povo unido. Gente without an article means people, folks, gente. You can use it to address a group of people oi gente, perhaps at the moment of joining or leaving the group. My intuition perceives this similarity as a blurring of the external and the internal, the them and us, the me and you.

Strikethrough indicates text I no longer hold to.

Italics indicates comments made during the process of translation, sometimes rooted in decisions to strike through and to rewrite.

Most things are translated, some of the commentary in italics is not because it needed to say different things in different times and places.

LOVE/TORTURE (after Ulrike Müller) 

AMOR/TORTURA (Esse título vem de um obra de Ulrike Müller em que ela leva seus espectadores norte americanos a se identificarem com as atividades do governo dos Estados Unidos contra prisioneiros de guerra.)

we’re in a borderlandsbordertimes just now maybe 

It feels wrong now to invoke the idea of a border to talk about possible unknown change.

todo mundo tem um centro e é um centro mas todo o poder delimita uma margem

everybody has a centre and is a centre but every power delimits a margin

feeling somewhat stable and set and fluid and safe and unsafe and uncomfortable and anxious

sentindo um tanto estável e fixa e líquida e segura e em perigo e desconfortável e ansiosa

and there

e lá

here

e aqui 

positioned

posiciona-se

somewhere, located in this moment

em algum lugar, por aí, situado nesse momento 

for this moment at least

ao menos por esse momento

edges happening 

dançando, por aí, pelos limites dos nossos corpos

Edges can happen but often they don’t happen, they are happened.

pode haver limites, por vezes não há limite, o limite acontece na voz passiva

dancing out through the edges of our bodies

adaptation

adaptação, talvez acomodando, talvez não 

adaptation, maybe accommodating, maybe not

margins moving shaping centres 

The one thing I learned was that there is fundamentally no centre, but the lumbering necropolitical ghost of one is dangerous.

toda a gente vive um centro, ou outros, eu posso fazer parte do seus centros, ou ficar na sua margem—sem o Poder é assim que se constitui a nossa relação

everyone of us lives a centre, or more, I can be part of your centres or stay at your margins—without power this is how our relations can constitute

sparking matter

faiscando matéria, provocando 

coming into making points of contact

indo, caminhando, fazendo pontos de contacto 

and all around us people are moving

à nossa volta gente está se movendo 

and categories are moving

e categorias estão se movendo

and chemical elements are moving

e elementos químicos estão se movendo

and geology is moving faster than it used to

e geologia está se movendo mais rápido que antes

and goods are moving

e os bens se movem

and abstract numbers are moving as flows of capital that is materialised only briefly as electricity between a server and a computer and in synapses of a trader

e números abstractos se movendo como fluxos de capital que se materializam brevemente como eletricidade entre um servidor e um computador e, nas sinapses de um operador

and we’re all swimming in shit and silicone beads and acidic effluents and run off from agrichemicals and baby wipes and cheaply and illegally dumped toxic waste hidden under super injunctions

e a gente está nadando em merda, e micropartículas de silicone e plástico, e afluentes ácidos, e agrotóxicos e lama tóxica desaguando nos rios, e lenços humedecidos, e resíduos tóxicos que foram ilegalmente despejados e escondidos sob ordens judiciais porque foi mais barato

and you and I and youse and me and we

e você e eu e vocês e a gente

are

a gente está e é

to be

estar ou ser

a we to be a we

a gente, a nós, a gente

being

estando ou sendo 

and a we are all a we except there are still them-s and we-s operating in us-es and them-s even though we-s are a we

e um nós é a gente, exceto que ainda estão inúmeros elxs-xs e nós-es usando a linguagem de elxs e de nós, se bem que todos estes nós-es sejam a gente 

and stones are a we

e pedras são a gente

E aqui foi uma parte onde eu escrevi algumas matérias e hábitos que são usados pela tortura. No original estava lendo para um público de arte, mais ou menos branco, num país que vende armas e instrumentos para tortura em países onde torturam cidadãos. A gente também tortura cidadãos de outros países, mas a gente faz isso em outros países com o objetivo de ocultar os abusos que fizémos. Eu não fiz uma tradução dessa parte porque aqui, nesse lugar, muitas pessoas conhecem alguém que viveu experiencias de tortura.

and electrodes attached to genitals are a we, and sticks and fists and boots ripping skin and smashing bone and painfully penetrating soft orifices are a we, and methods of starvation and sleep deprivation are a we, and fibres woven into ropes and grown into canes that beat soles of feet in falaka and bastinado are a we, and metals in wires that suspend people who have names in stress positions for days are a we 

The original of this text was written in 2015 with the refugee ‘crisis’ in mind. There were descriptions of torture. At the time I had recently stopped volunteering for an organisation that worked with people who had experienced torture. Sometimes, when I write about violence my audience is other white people, being like, why aren’t you more angry about this, feel this, touch this, maybe I’m thinking that if you feel something you might change your behaviour. But how do you talk about violence without reproducing violence? I took out the references to torture in the translation because in that language the time of the dictatorship was too recent.

Eu recomeço aqui, com o torturador e não com a pessoa que foi torturada.

and blood that pumps through muscles that use these materials to make those movements, those actions, and to clean floors afterwards, are a we

e o sangue que bombeia nos músculos que usam essas materiais para fazer estes movimentos, essas ações, e para limpar o chão depois, é a gente

and carbon is a we

e carbono é a gente

and silicone and hydrogen are a we

e silicone e hidrogénio são a gente

and water is a we

e agua é a gente

and a child with a broken leg trying to jump on a Eurostar train is a we

e uma criança com uma perna quebrada tentando pular num trem Eurostar é a gente

E desde que eu escrevi isto, tenho que dizer que as pessoas que se movem e moviam e vão continuar se movendo, fugindo por causa de violência e guerra e desigualdade estrutural e a mudança de clima, e que estão morrendo, são a gente.

And since I wrote this, I should say that uncountable people who move and have moved and will continue moving, seeking refuge because of violence and war and structural inequality and climate change, and who are dying, are a we.

and lawmakers and wannabe lawmakers are a we even as lawmakers and wannabe lawmakers do use them-s in the construction of more specific and narrower we-s that are not a we

e aqueles que fazem as leis e aqueles que quiserem fazer as leis são a gente, mesmo aqueles que fazem as leis e aqueles que querem fazer as leis dizem eles e elas para definir de forma mais específica e mais limitada um nós-es, e esses nós-es não são a gente

and types of exclusion and exploitation enacted by powerful and experienced by poorer and less powerful are a we

e formas de exclusão, e extração realizado por poderosos e vivido pelos mais pobres e os menos poderosos, são a gente

and bodies of people who mined minerals and rare metals that make magic of a micro processor in a phone that I am reading from work are a we

e os corpos das pessoas que trabalharam em mineração dos minerais e metais raros que fazem a magia invisível no microprocessador do meu computador onde eu escrevi este texto são a gente

and an I using a phone is a we

e um/a eu usando este computador é a gente

and a body of a miner and a body of one of hundreds of thousands of women raped as a method of warfare in a country where minerals used in making microprocessors are found are a we

e o corpo de um mineiro e o corpo de uma das centenas de milhares de mulheres que foram estupradas porque o estupro é um armamento de guerra num país onde os minerais usados para fazer microprocessadores são encontrados, são a gente

and colonial histories are a we

e histórias coloniais são e gente

and ongoing violences coming from those histories of violence are a we

e violências contínuas vindo dessas histórias de violência são a gente

and histories of slavery and subjectivation and subjection are a we

e histórias de escravidão e subjectivação e sujeição são a gente

and a we are all a fucking we

e a gente toda é a gente porra!

and we-s behave as if capitalism contains a we, the we, although that we excludes, ignores, objectifies, exploits or is unaware of much of a we

e a gente se comporta como se o capitalismo contivesse a gente, o só nós, no entanto aquele nós exclui, ignora, objetifica, tira proveito, ou não tem consciência de muito que é a gente 

and systems of oppression and domination have been a we for such a long time and such a short time that it is now ok to conceptualise a we as selfish

e os sistemas de opressão e dominação tem sido a gente por tanto tempo e tão pouco tempo que foi recentemente ok conceptualizar a gente como egoísta 

by pushing genetics into a mould with ideology

forçando a genética em um molde com ideologia 

when perhaps genetics might have something to say about a we as cooperative and symbiotic and interrelated

quando talvez a genética tenha algo a dizer sobre a gente como cooperativista e simbiótica e emaranhada e interligada e interdependente 

so a we could say that some of a we-s capacity to conceptualise a we is limited by effects of oppression on oppressors and oppressed

então, a gente poderia dizer que uma parte da capacidade da gente conceptualizar a gente está sendo limitada pelos efeitos de opressão sobre opressores e oprimidos 

and a we is so impregnated with violence that it can say anything through the making of them-s but them-s are a we

Impregnation metaphors about violence are pretty violent.

e um nós está tão reproduzido pela violência que pode dizer qualquer coisa através da criação desses eles e elas mas esses elas e elas são a gente 

and a we is so much reproduced through violence that it can say anything through the making of them-s but them-s are a we

although them-s and us-es excluded from categories of us-es and them-s may need to create further them-s and us-es to force on other us-es and them-s facts of their and our existences

no entanto elxs-xs e as gentes que são excluídas de categorias de eles e elas nós-es, talvez precise criar mais elxs-xs para forçar que outros eles e outras elas reconhecem essas existências da gente

and we are all a we

e a gente, todo mundo, é a gente

and some of us a we have a body and a body is time and a body is experiences that it exists through

All of us have a body…

e tem gente que tem corpos, e um corpo é tempo, e um corpo são vivências através das quais elx existe 

is a body is some cells is the air between us that is not empty space but is also molecules of a we

é um corpo, são algumas células no ar, entre a gente, que não é espaço vazio mas também são moléculas da gente

and for me a we some of the time lately having a body has been like carrying rocks around in a head but instead of rattling when shaken they move noiselessly as if suspended in a viscous fluid

e para mim, para a gente, às vezes, há pouco tempo, ter um corpo tem sido como carregar rochas na cabeça, mas quando as rochas são agitadas elas não fazem nenhum barulho, mas se movem silenciosamente como se suspensas num líquido viscoso 

wanting to wear a coat that’s too big the whole time

querendo usar um casacão grande demais o tempo inteiro 

not liking a body

não gostando de um corpo 

how it works and feels or how a me a one thinks it looks

como funciona e sente ou como um/a eu uma pessoa pensa que parece 

not being able to sleep

não sendo capaz de dormir

waking from sleep feeling like a curled up bit of paper

acordando de dormir se sentindo como um pedacinho de papel enrolado 

making a me a one get out of bed to go downstairs and finding itself crying in a kitchen

obrigando um/a eu uma pessoa a ir lá abaixo, encontrando se chorando na cozinha 

feeling guilty for taking up too much space

sentindo se culpada por ocupar espaço demais

feeling not wanting to continue to exist

sentindo que não quer continuar a existir 

feeling stupid

se sentindo estúpida

not being very responsive and sitting with a flat face finding a me a one frowning as it listens and waits for chemical compounds to accrue in its bloodstream and interfere in uncertain pathways with neurotransmitters

não se sentindo muito reactiva, sentindo me com um rosto vazio, se encontrando fazendo carranca enquanto esse corpo ouve e espera até compostos químicos se acumularem no seu sangue e interferirem com neurotransmissores em caminhos incertos

and movement that happens when light hits retinas in close proximity is a we

e movimento que acontece quando luz bate nas retinas ao perto é a gente

and movement that happens when a set of eyes squint slightly in a gesture of indescribable affect is a we

e movimento que acontece quando alguns olhos se franzem imperceptivelmente em um gesto de afeto indescritível é a gente

and a sensation of a touch is a we

e uma sensação de toque é a gente

and an interplay between a surface and a surface is a we

e a interação entre uma superfície e uma superfície é a gente

and blood flowing and sparking electricity of mirroring synaptic impulses firing when bodies of animals are in proximity is a we

e sangue a fluir e faiscando electricidade em impulsos sinápticos espelhados descarregando é a gente 

and an endless flow of conversation is a we

e um fluxo de conversa sem fim é a gente

and a needle of a spruce is a we

e uma agulha de pinheiro é a gente

and granite is a we

e granito é a gente

and a feeling body of a cuttlefish is a we

e o corpo sentindo de uma sépia é a gente

and a bird whose metabolism allows for it to be able to leap high into air to catch minuscule particles of floating food is a we

e um pássaro cujo metabolismo lhe dá a possibilidade de saltar alto para o ar para capturar pedacinhos de comida flutuante é a gente

and a pregnant mosquito seeking blood is a we

e uma mosquito mãe buscando sangue para suas crianças é a gente

and a movement of air that some of a we might call a wind is a we

e o movimento de ar que alguns da gente talvez chamam um vento é a gente

and a we is a difficult concept because it is so many we-s

e a gente é um conceito difícil porque a gente tem tantas gentes

and a we is a poorly functioning concept because conditions do not exist for all of many voices to be able to speak a we

e a gente é um conceito que funciona mal porque as condições ainda não existem para que todas as vozes possam falar e possam ser ouvidas falando a gente 

and often particular voices claim a we without consent from each of many we-s

e muitas vezes algumas vozes afirmam a gente sem consentimento de cada um das muitas gentes

and for much of a we speech is a meaningless human concept that occurs in a plane of experience of vibrations and time

e para grande parte de a gente, a fala é um conceito humano que acontece sobre um plano da vivência de vibrações e tempo 

and being a we means a we are all implicated and entangled

e sendo a gente quer dizer que a gente é, ou seja todos estão, envolvidos e emaranhados 

and perhaps that is difficult or doesn’t fit an ideology or connects to emotions that have been developed in social structures of a we

e talvez que aquilo seja difícil ou não sirva uma ideologia ou ligue a emoções que foram desenvolvidas dentro das estruturas sociais de a gente  

or is inconvenient to the expression of an I or a one

ou seja incómodo para a manifestação de um/a eu ou uma pessoa

or is slow and necessitates negotiation and compromise and giving up certain privileges or taking on certain responsibilities

ou seja lento e exija negociação e compromisso e desistindo de certos privilégios e aceitando certas responsabilidades 

or not having a structure that can be fixed independently of or in relation to others beyond this very moment

ou não tendo uma estrutura que possa ser fixa autonomamente ou sem relação da gente nesse momento e nos momentos que vêm e que vieram

and is philosophically challenging to certain dominant cultures

e é exigente para conhecimentos e pensamentos de certas culturas dominantes 

and perhaps also to ways that consciousness among human elements of a we has evolved thus far in these cultures

e talvez também para maneiras em que conciência entre elementos humanos evoluío até então nessas culturas dominantes 

and a structure of sentences with active subjects and passive objects doesn’t make a we feel or doesn’t feel a we

e a estrutura de frases com sujeitos activos e objectos passivos não faz que a gente sentir, ou seja, não sente a gente

can it describe a set of relations and movements that will change and shift?

pode descrever relações e movimentos que mudarão e transformarão?

is it a question of use?

é uma questão de uso?

or is it implicated in the violence of an us and a them and a me and a you?

ou está envolvido na violência de um nós e um eles e uma elas e um/a eu e um/a você?

because it really helped what a you a one a we was saying that time about passive and active forms in sentence structure

porque essa coisa que um você, uma pessoa, estava dizendo uma vez, sobre as formas passivas e activas na gramatica me ajudou muito

an I a one always got taught to avoid a passive

um/a eu, uma pessoa, foi sempre ensinada a evitar o passivo  

a bit of a father a one’s preference for short clear sentences informed by working with we-s who find it hard to read for whichever of the many possible reasons

um hábito de uma pessoa, um pai, que prefere frases curtas e claras, por causa de uma vida lendo com a gente que acha ler difícil por causa de muitas raizes possíveis 

hanging around a daughter a one a me a we

a rodear uma filha, uma pessoa, um/a eu, a gente

and remaining with a me a one like a smear or a jumper in a bag or just a habit really

e permanecendo com um/a eu, uma pessoa, com um pulôver numa bolsa em clima frio, ou na verdade só como um hábito 

but a relational one perhaps

mas um hábito relacional talvez

even though a father a one a we has no idea that a daughter an I a one a we carry this habit and enact it and think of it and a father a one a we when an I a one a we writes

embora um pai, uma pessoa, a gente, não faz uma ideia que uma filha, uma pessoa, um/a eu, continua esse hábito e usa isso e pensa nisso e pensa também num pai, numa pessoa, em uma gente, quando uma pessoa, um/a eu, a gente escreve

but a you a one a we were talking about how a political ontology changes with each sentence written

mas um/a você, uma pessoa, a gente, estava falando sobre como uma ontologia política muda com cada frase escrita 

and how a passive form can perhaps be useful when trying to write in a mode and method of bottom up changing

e como uma forma passiva pode talvez ser útil quando tentando escrever num modo e método de mudar da baixo para cima 

that it can allow for what is indistinct, processual, difficult to define with precision and clarity to have a place in making change and writing histories

que se pudesse possibilitar ao que é obscuro, indistinto, processual, o que evita definição simple ou clara, de não só ter lugar em processos de fazer transformações mas também em processos de escrever histórias

although it can be dangerous when used to articulate a top down power relation as having just come to be, then it is not a we perhaps

mesmo que uma forma passiva possa ser perigosa quando é usada para articular uma relação de poder de cima para baixo, como se simplesmente fosse, então talvez não seja a gente

‘and we are all five o’clock in the evening’

e a gente é toda essa tarde

and paralimbic systems of cetaceans that are particular in their form of making a sentience of a we, are also a we

e os sistemas paralímbicos de cetáceos que são especiais nas formas delas enquanto formando a consciência do grupo, da gente, são também a gente

‘or another hour’

ou uma outra hora

and symbiotic relationships of microscopic ocean critters that are particular in their form of making a sentience of a we, are also a we

e relações simbióticas dos bichinhos microscópicos do mar que também são especiais nas formas delas enquanto f formando a consciência do grupo, da gente, são também a gente

‘or rather two hours simultaneously'

ou talvez duas ou mais horas ao mesmo tempo

and photosynthesis and bacteria fixing nitrogen in plants in relation with a star, a sun, and a soil, in a we, that are particular forms of making a sentience of a we, are also a we

e fotossíntese e bactérias fixadoras de nitrogênio nas plantas em relação com uma estrela, um sol, um solo, em uma gente, que são igualmente especiais nas formas delas enquanto formando a consciência do grupo, são também a gente

‘noon-midnight but distributed in a variable fashion’

meio-dia, meia-noite, mas distribuído de uma maneira variável

‘waves broke on a shore’

ondas quebraram e quebrarão e estão quebrando em uma margem

This text about a we necessitates perhaps some words about this I. Recently, I was writing in a shared online document gathering more different words for queer experience and I wrote, ‘…guts, skin, I can’t tell if the inside is outside or the outside is inside because everything has melted into a different cellular arrangement where I can feel that there isn’t an inside or outside any of the time even though I might imagine there is…feeling at home, space to be without being aware of being watched [including by myself]…beauty in temporaryness…feeling understood in a deeper way than everyday, love…fluids, being present in my own body without feeling shame, a quicker access to desire, desire in fragments floating around everywhere, sharing, sensitivity and solidarity, salt, heat, presence.

Original English text 2015, rewritten 2017. Portuguese version written 2019.

The quotes in the English language text are borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaux and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.

Thank you to Emer Lynch and Tracy Hanna for hosting me while I wrote the original English text in a Dublin public library.

Agradecimentos à Camilla Rocha Campos por tudo, à Mariana Fernandes por me ajudar com o revisão final do texto Portugues, à Millena Lízia por sendo lá, à Tanja Baudoin por me ensinar sobre hospedando, e à Zaba Azevedo por me ensinar Portugues do Brasil e por me ajudar com o primeiro versões do texto Portugues.

Thank you to Ainslie Roddick for letting me take so long, amongst other things.

[katherinemacbride]

WORKING ON/WORKING THROUGH/WORKING WITH a mix for connective listening broadcast notes

WORKING ON/WORKING THROUGH/WORKING WITH

Katherine MacBride

Hotel Maria Kapel

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

10:00 01-05-2020

https://jajajaneeneenee.com/jn/shows/working-on-working-through-working-with/

BROADCAST NOTES 

solidarity actions

Support

Minimal vierteen euro voor iedereen. Een eerlijk loon.

https://www.voor14.nl

Donate

The Voice of Domestic Workers COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund: In light of the current COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak in the UK, migrant domestic workers are encountering further prejudice and precarity - both with clients cancelling their services and ‘live in’ Migrant Domestic Workers being asked to vacate their work places and homes. Like other precariously employed workers many of us exist without savings and are at the mercy of our employers who provide income and housing as part of the conditions of our work and our visas. https://www.thevoiceofdomesticworkers.com/post/covid-19-emergency-response-fund

Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union: Most of the members of Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union, one of Casco’s long-term and close-collaborating communities, are in a dire situation. They have lost their jobs as domestic workers and consequently their means to buy food and, likely soon, to keep their homes. Once again the community shows how powerful they are in organizing to support each other by arranging and distributing weekly emergency food packages. Yet this cannot be done without donations from anyone who has the room to do so. Please donate to R. Saptari. NL93 INGB 0006 3903 55. (via Casco newsletter)

CRIP FUND is an ad-hoc care collective pooling money for chronically ill, disabled, and immunocompromised people living in the United States in serious financial need during this ongoing time of love, coronavirus, and apocalyptic joy & pain. With your support we’re hoping to support your real hope of collective care. Crip Fund will privilege people who are immunocompromised and/or disabled* in need of in-home care; Queer/Trans/Black/Indigenous/People of Color (QTBIPOC) in financial need will also be prioritized. 

*”Disabled” here is cross-disability cultures, and may include: those experiencing chronic illness, those on immunosuppressive meds, bone marrow or solid organ transplant recipients, inherited immunodeficiency, HIV, and other immunocompromised people, those with physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities, mental health disabilities, Autism, neurodiverse people, D/deaf, Blind, DeafBlind, and many more whether or not someone identifies with the word “disability” or is recognized as “disabled” by the Medical Industrial Complex.

a mix for invoking connective listening

I wrote that this was to be a mix for invoking connective listening. The word connective often makes me think of Juliana Spahr’s Poem Written after September 11, 2001, which is one of two poems in her book this connection of everyone with lungs. Juliana often writes using looping rhythmic repeating lists, adding one element each round in poems and prose about environmental politics, settler colonialism, unlearning white feminism, extraction, warfare, and writing. In Poem…the list scales out before scaling back in. It crescendos around here (in flow but not force, because she uses the silence of microscopic air particulates to hit the final impact later):

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out. 

Differentials in death rates from COVID-19 indicate that “we are” not actually “all in the same boat.” Some of this is to do with the long term effects of air pollution: “we” breathe the same air while “we” do not breathe the same air, while every cell of every “we” contains bacterial DNA whose ancestors breathed the “air” into b(r)e(ath)ing.

This mix for connective listening includes music of forms where listening to the others sounding around you while you improvise together in relation to a context, a social purpose, or a shared task is especially important—music made as a way of manifesting togetherness together. Of course there is much to say about what happens when such forms are indeed recorded but I won’t address that here. 

I’ve been thinking with a section of Eileen Myles’ book The Importance of Being Iceland:

All the churchgoers were singing the same hymn not the same notes or tunes. No organ tone set the pitch so they would find it instead among themselves. People were literally singing their hearts out. When the organ was introduced in the 30s some of the older people stopped going to church because the idea of everyone singing the same tune at once seemed “obscene” to them, it offended their Icelandic sense of religiosity, or privacy, or just their understanding of what being part of a community could mean. The radio also upset the applecart with the same songs played over and over with those same versions and the same notes. It’s amazing to think about what the radio might have upset. I’m getting this from all sides. I heard about this singing, and then I read about it, and finally the book I read was co-written by a composer that my friend Mark studied with. These rediscoveries are not accidental. There’s an imprecise mourning needed to see where we are now. I think it’s like the species rediscovering itself. learning to be stubborn in our awkward speaking and hearing.

F told me about the way her friends would organise a collective ritual to connect to their language that, like their land, is endangered. After a time certain older people would arrive at a state where they could access parts of the language that they didn’t know in their everyday state. Certain younger people would use their mobile phones to record what the certain older people were saying. The community would send the recordings to the anthropologists at the university and the anthropologists would analyze the recordings and add any new words to the dictionary of the community’s endangered language so that certain older people and certain younger people could continue to fertilize their language when they spoke it together.

Eileen follows the turf churches radio applecart with a description of a singing form called Kvaedaskapur. The distinguishing characteristic of the singing was a variable voice, which always sang the poem with differing melody…Typically the Kvaedamadur denies authorship. He (or she. There were female Kvaedamur too) didn’t steal it. He just didn’t write it. Maybe the implication being the poem just kind of grew…

In the darkness of winter the singing would generate a sonic connectivity between the singer and the listeners who would also actively keep the song alive. The singer drops his energy at the end of the line but several people in the room come in (vocally) and sing the end of the line for and with him. They hold him up so to speak.

connecting messy links

I haven’t included fragments of Taraneh Fazeli’s text in these notes because it was a working document shared to be spoken since she was in bed sick at the time of collaboration. Instead I’ll share this link to a text she published a while back — http://temporaryartreview.com/notes-for-sick-time-sleepy-time-crip-time-against-capitalisms-temporal-bullying-in-conversation-with-the-canaries/ — and these words she wrote about the text I read from in the mix: In “Labour of Love: To curate is to care,” Taraneh Fazeli thinks alongside Lisa Baraitser, Tanya Titchkosky, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten. Additionally, her text emerges from a working on/in/through with the many folks who have been a part of her traveling exhibition “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” which addresses the politics of health and care. (Note: “crip” is a political reclaiming of the derogatory label cripple by disability activists.) Based in an ethic of care emerging from disability justice that values interdependencies and dependencies, artworks within counter the over-valorization of independence in American society and examine how racialized global capitalism has produced debility in many populations while, at the same time, creating bureaucratic infrastructures that support very few people. At the core of the project is the pairing of artists with community groups organized around creating or sustaining alternative infrastructures of care, such as groups of young single mothers at Project Row Houses, women recently involved in the carceral system at Angela House, and refugees and asylum seekers via Lutheran Family Services. Excerpts from the text are specifically rooted in collaborations with Cassie Thornton, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, and the Young Mothers. 

Panelaço, Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, March 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvDSXLeijuk

Panelaço is the Brazilian word for a pot banging protest. Mobile phone recordings of people protesting against Jair Bolsonaro’s pandemic response by banging pans from their apartments window and balconies. Compiled by O Globo news service and uploaded to YouTube.

Repente, CPTM, São Paulo, May 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOBjc4PbVKM

My friend G once described relationships to me in terms of a dynamic equilibrium over who plays the tambourine while the other sings. Of course sometimes everyone can sing and sometimes everyone can play the tambourine but taking turns means everyone gets a change to breathe. Repente is a form of music from the north east of Brazil where two singers have a battle of improvised lyrics on a theme, often political, usually funny. While one sings the other holds the beat on a tambourine. 

Yelli water drumming, 2011

last video down on https://face2faceafrica.com/article/the-liquindi-water-drumming-of-central-africa-reserved-for-women-hunters

I was looking out for a video I half remembered of a man playing the water in a very kitschy-beautiful way. I couldn’t find it but I learned about this shared drumming practice done by Baka women in Cameroon and Gabon. 

Cloth waulking in South Uist, 1982

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CmGJ5dwBuk

Waulking is a process of textile finishing where woven wooden cloth is soaked in urine and beaten on a table to soften and shrink it. In the Outer Hebrides in Scotland waulking was done by hand to tweed cloth. This work was done by groups of women who would sing and chat while they waulked. It’s a call and response form with the caller holding the rhythm of the collective movement, meaning that song structures had to be somewhat loose and open to improvisation according the situation on the table, in the room, in the moment. When this video was filmed, the waulking was probably being performed for the camera in a university effort to record the practice while there were still women alive who carried it. Waulking is done today as a form of cultural reenactment or historical research by practice rather than as a living tradition.

Women gathering mushrooms, The Music Of The Bayaka: Volume I, 2007

I wrote Louise: I’ve been thinking a bit this week about this recording of women singing while they collect mushrooms in the forest. I’ll try and find if for you, have only found it mixed with something else so far. What I like is that the women sing in relation with their environment, so that different species in the forest sound at different parts of the sonic spectrum and don’t cut over each other, producing a sonic environment/composition where everything has a place but together co-creates very beautiful music. This way of singing without dominating others feels very special. I’m thinking about this in relation to the birds I am hearing, wondering if they are making more sound with the reduced traffic because they feel more space, or if the more space is just in my perception, but for sure there is some more space happening somewhere.

Toumani Diabaté plays the kora, 2007

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8luhdxS2KuM

Ballu Tundu, Orgosolo (Nuoro), 1969, Musica Sarda Vol. 3

Sardinian confraternity multipart singing occupies a space that is remote from any concept of concert music; it is in fact a living musical practice through which collective relationships are represented and enacted. It is a major element of the social life of several villages through which many people—both locally situated performers and competent listeners—‘think about who they are’ and ‘the world around them’. (Confraternity Multipart Singing: Contemporary Practice and Hypothetical Scenarios for the Early Modern Era, Ignazio Machiarella)

Lampedusa, Toumani and Sidiki, Toumani Diabaté and Sidiki Diabaté, 2014

We were very shocked - Sidiki and myself - while we were recording in London in November 2013 and we watched on TV that more than 350 people had died in the sea trying to arrive in Europe by boat. Since them many Lampedusas have happened. Nothing changes. I don’t know the solution. I don’t know how to do but I think we must talk about it. This is why Sidiki and I composed the song, to talk about it. (http://shufsounds.com/interviews/2015/5/8/toumani-and-sidiki-diabat-interview)

Huku ine Ronda (originally by Chartwell Dutori), played by Gift Mugwidi, 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKbfUEhjuH4

Gift Mugwidi makes and plays mbiras and sells them in Mbare Musika in Harare. Someone he knows films him playing them in cars and uploads the videos to YouTube. I found his name and a basic education in Zimbabwean chimurenga music deep in the comments. 

Sa Ugoy ng Duyan, sung by Mimi Jalmasco and Wendy Caballero, mixed by Louise Shelley, London, April 2020

Louise wrote me: Katherine if it’s ok please can you read this before playing the audio, thank you. What you will shortly listen to is a recording of a Filipino lullaby sung by Mimi Jalmasco and Wendy Caballero who are two members of The Voice of Domestic Workers in London. Over the past 8 years I have been a volunteer with this organisation, they are a self organised support, education and campaign group, by and for migrant domestic workers. The passion in their politics in inescapable - their collective labours focus on care and support for each other, to get justice as workers for each other. Their precarity like many others is increased at present, whilst they re-organise and figure out what to do, what needs doing and how to do it, their work continues in their employers households. This is a song from their homes, from their childhoods, from their early motherhoods that they now sing to the children they work for and to each other and now to you. The recordings were sent to me to be shared here, they are mixed with the sounds of listening in my own flat with my back door open onto east London in isolation in April 2020. This invitation to them was also a way to move money from the arts in solidarity with their struggle and also very simply to share their voices, their energy, their beautiful song to soothe but also to awaken you, to 11.5 million migrant domestic workers in the world. 

thanks

Thanks to: Radna and Arif at Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee for hosting the broadcast; to Miriam, Rik, and Annelien at Hotel Maria Kapel for supporting the residency where this began brewing; and to the contributors Louise Shelley, Taraneh Fazeli, and Mimi Jalmasco and Wendy Caballero from The Voice of Domestic Workers.

[katherinemacbride]

tongue breaks inhaling

Script for performance at CCA Glasgow, February 2019. With many thanks to Angelica Falkeling, Anna Frei, Clara J:son Borg, and Raluca Croitoru.

THE END OF THE WORLD (KATHERINE) 

There was an idea here of a fictional future, one that imagines a different kind of life.

There was that time in Athens thinking about how one plus one equals many things and a plus b does not equal c or d or anything simple and straightforward. The thing that struck me was the relationship to time, how the rocks were present in modernity making modernity itself be just a blip, a temporary reality, nothing more. But those rocks signified something else, they signified the beginning of modernity’s love affair with itself, the foundations of white privilege, the recasts of statues white and uncoloured denying the truth of their making time, communities accommodating difference around places that are now separated as Africa, middle east, europe. Communities of fascists situating their power in the past, a divine right to make whiteness out of Black death, Jewish death, Roma death, sometimes a while ago Italian death, Portuguese death, Irish death. A female politician being punched on live tv by a member of a fascist group, nuanced strategies to tackle domestic violence, pragmatic and magical approaches to crisis, her dad who can’t afford his health insurance and self medicates with the gym until the pain is too much, people with stuff and no money, people with no stuff and no money, international education, discrimination in the north, being paid less than minimum wage in London, 

I finally read ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ in 2017, I knew it from Emilia who helped make this performance what it is today in their role as a friend and their role with Collective Text.

In Marge Piercy’s book she writes of a future where things are decided communally, where the earth is a respected and loved and cared for host, where work is shared according to ability, child care is de-gendered and genetics are shared, difference is valued and appreciated, pleasure is had, struggles continue, empathy and awareness of the body’s capacities are high, colonial reparations have been paid, resources are not expropriated, when people cannot get on they are asked to talk until they find something, anything, they have in common. A book of small details, a future interspersed with a 1970s present where structural inequality forces poverty, violence, forced infertility, and psychiatric pathologisation of resistance onto the character. In the end, to fight to make the future happen she loses her sensitivities, has to cut off her pleasurable possibilities of travelling to the future. Time is entangled not linear.

I can’t write a fiction now because it isn’t true. I think it would be dishonest. I’m not sure if a white European person can write visionary fiction or if her attention is better allocated to acknowledging historical and present realities. Decolonisation happens in stages—critiquing the structures, imagining others, making change—and maybe I wanted to jump some. The last remaining rescue boat in the Mediterranean just had its flag removed, likely after Italian government pressure on Panama. EU money has been spent on detention centres in Libya where detainees are tortured. Insect societies have collapsed in the changing temperatures and pesticide induced soil sterility.

But I did want to imagine a present with some different turns in the past.

What happens in this story? Four women are invoked across time. Four women meet. Here. Somehow. Or do they need to when they can affect each other across the distance of time without simultaneously existing in similar forms—with you in particles if not mass—having been breathed out.

I only just realised the connection between the past and present that a perfect tense signifies in grammar. Pasts have consequences. In relationships, trauma and joy and previous life manifests. Across generations even. My body is impacted by your previous behaviours. Your body is impacted and constructed by my present and previous behaviours. I exist because you starved. I exist because they were killed. We exist temporarily in this mess, my bones made from cosmic material brought to earth on a comet, my body either a form of carbon capture or carbon release depending on burial or cremation, and what kind of coffin I might get. My body borrowed on borrowed time, owing to everyone and everything else. 

What would it be to be so vulnerable? What would it be to be so supported? What would it be to feel me feeling you and to be okay with the momentary understanding that comes in a glance and the lifelong misunderstanding that comes in a culture.

What kinds of sensitivity might be expected, might be appreciated, might be valued?

What ways of knowing?

SAPPHO (RALUCA)

Sweetbitter mythweaver.

Making her own language, finding words to sing about female solidarity and friendship and sex and intimacy and care as being together, and not being commoditized. An ambiguity of language too complex for later scholars needing to define her as lesbian or not lesbian, the simplifying of structures of living and feeling that we don’t imagine, the same words she made coming to a patriarchal use meaning non-married female lover of a married man. 

She comes to us through citation in treatises on grammar or style. She exists in other peoples’ paraphrasing although her work is the substance of memory. The structuring forms being grammar and rhythm, she would break the rules of the grammar to fit the rhythm, change the sounds of the words, make elisions, contractions, cuts and edits where certain moments of material could be held between the audience and the people singing the line, notes bending, material stretching, the whole being considered always and the parts adapting. I move you move we move. Talking and seeing the constellation of your thoughts makes mine move and they’re all flying around changing, being changed. Changing, fusing, and fragmenting.

Distress causes the tongue to break.

On this ground we are walking.

MARIA (CLARA)

I could only reach her by touching her work that time and she’s far away in the just-pre-internet graveyard of the female-unwritten-about so here’s a story of ears and hands, listening and touching.

If they’re both there, are they both being touched? Could they sleep like that?

Like that one time you slept in a bed with someone and you both held each other and woke in the same position as when you fell asleep. Would that be possible with the ears?

End of the world for night, resting the organ that can’t stop sensing. Give it some rest with those hands. Tiny massage points. A special kind of cartilage, flesh in between the densities of hard and soft. 

If it was just the ears and they were the whole body they could hold each other maybe?

But the pleasure is also in the hand that holds. A handle like on a climbing wall. A shape made for the human hand to feel good holding it and one it can hold in sex and in non sex like when you gave me massage in a sad time and I never had someone who wasn’t a lover touch them like that. You hear me?

MELINA (ANGELICA)

imagine there weren’t the same types of shyness 

what would the future look like then?

the same types of shame 

shame of being ashamed

of intergenerational shame

shyness as vanity they say 

shyness as fear of losing whatever power you have

shyness as downgrading whatever capacities you have

shyness as a refusal to take a risk

shyness as a necessary safety device for one exposed to unsafety

shyness as internalisation of the feeling of being wrong

having the wrong body, the wrong ideas, the wrong intelligence,

the wrong interests that comes from perhaps a fear of conflict

perhaps too much prior conflict

LENA (ANNA)

She and we are made of time. The geological time that records the actions of all the ancestors into the ice.

ENTANGLEMENT (ALL)

Being breathed out, having been breathed out, inhaling, breaks

[katherinemacbride]

pauline, breathing, coracão, alex

Text used for a recording broadcast on Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee at the Minimal Music Festival, Amsterdam, April 2019. 

https://www.jajajaneeneenee.com/jn/shows/minimal-music-festival/ 

Also available as part of Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee podcast, episode F08 HOW TO BE GENEROUS. 

https://www.jajajaneeneenee.com/jn/podcast/

[1]

I’m in Brazil which is why this is a recording. A white body in a warm place trying to listen. In samba schools the foundation of the music is called the coracão. Coracão means heart. It holds a steady double beat that’s intimately related to the in/out double beat of the human heart, the body of the music and dance connecting afro-brazilians to bodies of ancestral peoples across time and space, the beat transported across the country through feminist community organising, the beat appropriated for whiteness and reclaimed in ongoing struggles. 

Pauline Oliveros based some compositions on the heart rates of the performers…the hearts start to beat in time, in rhythm, the music holding everyone together so that they feel into the fact that they are part of the same thing. 

I saw her twice. Once for a talk and a solo performance. Later for a deep listening workshop. 

The workshop was gentle. It changed how I hear the sound in my dreams. Ione stirred everything everyone said into the soup with a circular gesture and this along with the practice of listening for when a chime began and ended sounding reminded me of the remnants of the 1970s social practices that hung on in my 1980s multicultural primary school and made me think of the women who kept witchy ideas alive when they weren’t cool like they are at the moment.

I remember being struck by several things in the talk. Pauline used powerpoint in a very sweet way, using patterned borders to hold the text, and she felt so North American…in that way of a certain generation of older white women who’ve been engaged in various forms of action their whole lives and currently go to protests in their wheelchairs. People were sitting in the stairs and I think she encouraged more to come in and no-one told her off for that…the privilege of age and celebrity. She used at least half of the time she was allotted to tell the audience about the works of a younger generation of women composers, a direct way of doing feminism. 

There was a discussion and some people had very urgent and specific questions about how to fight within the various institutions they were in. Her replies were all simple and non-institutional, restating her often told message that if you can’t find a space or a group or a community for what you’re doing, then make one, two people is already a community.

I think the questioners might have wanted more detail but this was her thing as I understood it…everything is already there, work with things you care about, be attentive to what you don’t know or understand, approach the world with curiosity and be generous, understand your entanglement in the universe, give your energy, spend more time listening, grow and the world grows. 

There’s a big conversation about privilege and access and acceptable forms of dissent to be had alongside this but for now I’m staying with the simple message. Because I think that’s how I understand her work, or at least how I understand it through my own…come back to the most basic things, every day, make a politics out of doing simple things differently, in ways that reveal and question the underlying ideologies of the basic structures of everyday reality, share this, find others who are questioning, work with them, build feminist networks where you do stuff differently, these networks will be different today than in Pauline’s time so they’ll need to work with the big conversation about privilege and access and acceptable forms of dissent to be actually political, they’ll need to understand their limits and be in solidarity and co-operation with other networks practicing different feminisms, they’ll need those listening practices because the work will never be completed.

She got out her accordion and played.

I understood her performance as a kind of breathing in and out of the room. The sound waves breathing through everything. Life breathing. Beautifully. Being together in a very present feeling moment that through the vibrations is also among past and future time.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes very beautifully about and organises around breathing as a practice of black revolution, spirituality, being free, being. She says: 

“What do you believe in that keeps you breathing despite blatant violence and disrespect?  What do you believe in more than the evidence of injustice? I believe in the words and actions of Black women and queers across space and time.”

The quote is from an essay she wrote for New Inquiry called That Transformative Dark Thing. I suggest you read it. [2]

In workshops, I often tell people about how when they breathe they are connecting the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric parts of their nervous systems, connecting processes they are aware of with processes that happen outside of their consciousness. Breathing. Being. Listening.

[1] The sound clip that forms part of the broadcast recording features the bodies of Angelica Falkeling, Anna Frei, Clara J:son Borg, Raluca Criotoru, and myself

[2] https://thenewinquiry.com/that-transformative-dark-thing/

[katherinemacbride]

The Weather (1)

Written for Rotterdam Art Writing, Issue 1, Spring 2019. (Edited by Anastasia Shin, Eric Patel, and Nick Thomas.) https://rotterdamartwriting.org/Issue-One-Spring-2019

Rotterdam, early December 2018

I am sitting in the consulting room. The person is taking my history. There are several breakdowns in communication going on. Medical records are not here, neurotransmitters are too slow too fast, words are failing, words cannot be made. I’m speaking Dutch but the clumsily adopted language is not the main issue, my mother language is differently unreliable in the cognitive fog where I don’t trust what I am saying. Making words makes my head hurt. There’s been a fire in the frontal lobes that the tears are misplacedly trying to put out. In one of the several long moments where the person leaves the room to bring back another paper with a different communicative power—a prescription, a phone number scribbled down, my almost empty dossier—I receive a text from a colleague asking if ‘rotterdammer’ is spelled with two ems in English or one. I text back the following day to suggest keeping two and to ask for time off work. 

The next time I see the health professional whose job title is a perplexing simple noun and whose employing company is a workshopped adjective, she asks me about work and money and I talk about self-employment. I get too many emails advertising Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week, followed by an email from Witte de With asking me, Katherine, to give on Giving Tuesday. I haven’t sent an action email in a while.

An early sign of the storm is when I hear the shipping forecast on the radio when I can’t sleep and I’m sure but not sure that it says the storm will lose its identity and then I’m not sure but sure I’m losing my mind. Other warning signs are chat group paranoia and marking of but not responding to emails. Text messages are burning. I don’t go to the Kick Out Zwarte Piet protest because the storm makes land the day before, but I see the texted photos and the official pre-action emails reminding me to wear warm clothes followed by their lengthy post-action siblings—reports on counter protests and policing that are a litany of violence and aggression told in a language of non-violence and legal fees fundraising with a planned debriefing to come.

The structure for this column was agreed in a time before the last weeks when the weather felt different. There was residual heat from the fossil-fuel-fried summer, at least in the skin’s memory, and the frontal lobes were holding on, poorly maintained deluge defences. The structure for this column is a weather report, writing the weather based on what arrives to my inbox and app interfaces, seeing what this data stream is saying when it pulls me under as a flood or arrives in a single beautiful droplet that magnifies something of the world. The form will change with the light, the blowing wind, and the wetness; the atmospheric pressure, the sea levels, and the water table. The weather understands the weather as personal and political, locally and unequally experienced but inseparably global; indicative of underlying patterns yet open to flurries of the unexpected, out of character or time.

[katherinemacbride]

petrol riots

Written July 2018 while at The Sensing Salon, PAF.

I tremble. I tremble you.

I tremble the sea bed, making waves in the geological tides that will be felt for aeons, vibrating in the waves of geological tides that brought us to here now before not yet.

I am growing, faster than geology has commonly been known to since the times of the last ice ages. The sea bed is cracking and unfamiliar forms of bacteria who will mutate to metabolise ultra violet light are flooding out of the chasms where they’ve been laying, dormant, breathing. Waiting.

I tremble you.

I tremble the cabling network running across the ocean floor. Glass fibres encased in black petroleum based plastics. As thick and thin as your forearm. Hitting land in Lagos, in Porto, in São Paolo, in Chesapeake Bay. My tremors penetrate the fibres. And slowly twist. Tearing. Fraying. Snap. Internet blacks out.

The island is growing. The mountains are growing. Higher. Bigger.

Lush black soil is ripe with plants. Coming out from their hiding places in the forest. Rhizomatic root forms are queerly multiplying in spatial relations that can be understood through quantum field theory. There a root, now yesterday now again a tree. There a shoot, now and tomorrow, many. There lightening feeling its way. There ripeness, heavy life, rawness, tender. And death. And nourishment.

The leaves are mulching on my skin and their nitrogen draws down through me saturating the soil with fertility such that it grasps the humidity from the air and pulls it in replenishing the secret aquifer that they do not know.

A boy is drinking from the well.

She dreamt him then. He was holding the pain and the violence and the resignation and he managed to sleep under the landfill site. He is starving after such a hibernation and he drinks deep and the trees reach down to offer him their fruits and seeds and he is growing. And he is many. He is many many people, hiding and resting since the chaos of the last occupation being fed by mountain, being hidden, growing strong, safely invisible. It is everyone to whom this island cares who is here on the mountain. The others left in the evacuations. Occupation. Earthquake. Abandonment.

But we were not hiding. We were here. We were feeding and growing enough strength to be able to heal from the silence and to be able to destroy your communicative lifelines with my vibrations.

They’re slipping along quickly in the low cold channels of the ocean right now. The whales shared their frequency layer to broadcast to the others everywhere who’ve also been growing stronger.

We’re ready now.

You are weak. Stuck in time with no in-feeling capacities. You rely on 1s and 0s and violent control. You rely on the molecules of the dead to power the machines that run your systems. You are dying. You just have’t realised it yet.

I tremble you.

And the plants on my surface distribute further with each movement. The molecules of the dead are being drawn to here by the songs of the plants.

We remember.

The molecules of the dead are singing too. Coming together. They’re around us everywhere making a protective layer.

They’re haunting you. 

It’s happening now.

I tremble.

I tremble you.

You tremble. 

Tremble. 

Fall.

[katherinemacbride]

solidarity in sites of temporary hospitality, you do what you can with what you’ve got

Text written August 2018. For Hagen Verleger (ed.), Margaret van Eyck—Renaming an Institution, a Case Study (Volume Two: Comments, Contexts, and Connections), Peradam Press, NY, 2018.

https://hagenverleger.com/portfolio/margaret-van-eyck-volume-two/

 Prelude/Postscript

He was talking about the library as a site of radical hospitality: because the person holding the space cannot know the content of all that is being held, in fact it is better if they don’t, because then their focus is on the hospitality, rather than making their own voice among the tangles of sentences in some of the books. [1]

She was critiquing the Western European perspective of not articulating a voice as a way of dealing with colonial guilt. Her critique was that this was both an attempt at empathy but also extremely privileged. [2] What do you do when you’ve wasted your own epistemologies by using them so violently, when you’ve taken up all the space already, how is it possible to make work that listens, can you speak, how do you learn to speak more quietly when you’ve been trained to be at the centre, should you shut up and fuck off? What are all the men doing?

We were swimming in the studio, lesbian empathy. Notes everywhere, to self, to unknown, to a different self, from a different self.

“Capacity Based Exchange,” he was saying; each according to what they can do. All share. [3]

“We share values,” someone says [4], but the values didn’t get a name so how do “we” know? And even if they had a name, there is that big gap between the word and its meaning, that space for editing and remaking and erasing, as Christina Sharpe says. [5]

While you’re reading this, think about friction. Dirty fingers rubbing paper, skin on skin, bodies that don’t fit. Rubbing up the wrong way. “Remember: deviation is hard. Deviation is made hard.” [6]

I was supposed to be writing about dust, and dirt, and sweat. And books. The books that you taught me tell you things even if you think that as books they’re boring, the books I was learning to read as a context not as content. The catalogue shelf for example, filled with female editors care-taking the writing of male essay writers, the exhibitions in regional institutions, the work of the institution we are in represented as books, all this labour and how do I read it now. Not carefully enough, I feel. 

Making change is dirty, tiring, boring, upsetting, enraging, finding your allies. Unending.

It was dark, to protect the books, and cool, but not cold, and certainly not damp. The room was sound-proofed, from the mixed musical fragments thrown out the windows of the conservatory, by the trees standing in the garden, the blanket of carefully selected ground-covering perennials, a village of bicycles chained to the fence, and the partial jutting out of the opposite wing of the building. A place to go and write. A place to go and hide in plain sight. A place to go and observe from your quiet seat the comings and goings of the management (collective noun) and the management (verbal noun). The caretaker, writer, poet. The librarian, writer, novelist. Two of the beautiful possibilities of provincial life where people are allowed to slide into roles for which they are not officially trained but are precisely skilled, temperamentally matched, committed, and able to bring some flow and energy.

Dust/Dirt made from particles of paper residue left over from cutting the pages, microfibres from cleaning cloths, dead human skin cells detached from their organ, sugar granules, dust mites, desiccating coffee molecules, food particles, broken-down hair follicles, tobacco threads, traces of drugs in pre- and post-ingestion forms, clay particulate from the soil outside, DNA, fragments of art materials, faeces, sand, sweat. It is sticky from the proteins; the human matter. The type of paper in each book must alter the dust composition through its attractant or repellent qualities. And what is that smell, the book smell that indicates its age roughly, is it accumulated dust and sweat? 

A room with a dry smell. Most of the books too well-kept, or not so old as, to have foxed pages and those moist smells familiar in memories of rummaging in boxes at sales and in garages. Archival quality papers, hot pressed smoothness, the chemical grassy smell of freshly printed large distribution. The occasional papers [7]—A4 printed essays, stapled and set into plastic folders, flopping awkwardly among the books, their matt surfaces supporting tough content asking questions of the ranks of catalogues memorialising indistinct exhibitions of regional and international artists; remnants of the theory department persisting in participants that came after holding fast to writing as a critical tool. Radical, beautiful thought unfolding in 11pt fonts. Their format whispering, refusing, sticking to academic norms; their words shouting “find me you fucker.” Documents of group processes made public in pages—the process evading the printing press—presented fragments and transcripts, quotations and diagrams, occasional bit-mapped photographs; everything is Riso-printed, upstairs, on creamy absorbent paper stock. 

She was angry. Sunday morning. Dressed prettily, playing music, angry. She was tired, sitting among the aisles working quickly, but making slow movement along. He was bored, writing lists of new curricula. They were sad. The energy was held unevenly, fed by stolen-or-shared cigarettes and sweet coffees, chatting outside on the wooden platform, red wine, moments of recognition and pleasure, durations of pointlessness, biscuits and trail mix. How many days? Rushes of energy—who bought all this African philosophy in the early 1990s! Quick shelves: bleak. Fiction for instance, clang each spine on the metal shelf quickly. Quick shelves: like friends. Feminism for example, this, this, this, oh not that one, wonder why, not much to turn here because women wrote this shelf mostly. Put the single book about masculinities on the collective pile. Finding things like jewels on the beach, books you’d forgotten about, books you’d heard of but never encountered, books you’d never met, books not very present on the internet. Fantasies of who was ordering these, stories of books being trashed and rescued resistantly from the piles of waste. Epistemological wastage [8] comes in overlapping layers: firstly, and undoably always continuingly, violent; later or simultaneously through violence’s secondary forms of stupid, penny-pinching, “progressive” [9] bureaucracy. 

They were fighting a bit, one likes big gestures, one likes small details, so it is difficult. Strategically, politically, and ontologically different ways of dealing with the question and its answer: “And who does the labour benefit? The institution really.” These positions are fighting around and within me. The details liker is directed, like an animal following a scent, there is a sensitivity to something in the air that I can’t perceive, they’re sure of the path they’re moving along, but not so sure that they’re not open to taking another one if something comes up. The big gestures seeker worries more—I can relate to this—maybe because the pressure of that expectation is a bit crushing. What kind of self-confidence and stamina do you need to continue with a task that is so temporary, that many would regard as futile? 

Learning

Learning the knowledge that your body is remembering anew, again—

does it forget in order to survive, like some bodies somehow forget the physicality of cumulative not sleeping in baby feeding periods and desire to fuck reproductively again, 

does it forget because it takes too much energy to remember the way it stiffens when it is threatened, in between all the times when someone chooses to assert their existence in a mode of power and threat against yours,

does it sometimes ignore what it actually is knowing all the time, because life would be too sad and raging if it did acknowledge this without the caring company of the others in this room, or other others in other rooms

—of how hard it is to make change, just how repetitive and boring and physically hard it is to do even this one tiny thing. When this one tiny thing is complete the how hard is suddenly so visible and makes that systemic oppression clear. This is what it means. It means billions fewer words in space. Galaxies of thought that have no space in here. Making stories to remember important information. Making gatherings to learn how to do things. Getting out of bed to go take care of the thing you were doing yesterday and see how it is now it’s tomorrow. Making peace. Making reparations. 

Learning the contingencies of making decisions as you go along, the system can never be perfect and consistent. This time I felt generous, this time not, this one was a balance of problems, this one breaks the rules entirely but it is an important book that should be visible so I put it on the table.

Books are carbon, captured, stable, running without a data centre. A wasted epistemology is also often wasted land-water-air. My wasting epistemology is made of your natural resources, and your body, because mine weren’t and isn’t enough. But I feel my greed and overuse as not having enough, being underfed, dysmorphia of the body, the culture, the interconnectedness of it and us all. 

Prelude/Postscript

The difficulty of doing things differently, the slowing down or changing of methods. Inductive reading, reading across time, lingering in the period between two publication dates to see what changes between one text and the other. Time, hearing and time, time is material, time is everything, time is not straight, time was, time is, time will, now and not now, two kinds of time, or three, past present future, or more, entanglement of all the possible and actualised times, waiting for time to pass until something heals, but what if it doesn’t ever heal, or it can’t, it’s eaten into the DNA that’s being passed around, it's so embedded in the structural oppressions that it can’t yet heal into something else, because it never stopped happening, it’s not past, it’s now. 

Everywhere the time is being stolen that’s needed to do this work. Stolen from and stolen by, stolen in order to do, and stolen from that possibility.

In the car you said something like, “maybe we should all refuse to speak in the moderated and mediated rational language we’re taught to think it’s better to fight in so we don’t look emotional.” [10]

[door of the public speaking/shaming room slams, shaking the seats]

[walls of the broken-into-on-the-weekend library ring with thought and study and laughter]

[1] Nick Thurston, “Speculative Libraries” (talk, PrintRoom, Rotterdam, June 18, 2018).

[2] Cristina Bogdon, “Fuck off Transmediale (provisional title),” Revista-Arta, (February 8, 2018): http://revistaarta.ro/en/column/fuck-off-transmediale-provisional-title/

[3] Michel Bauwens, comment made during “FAQs on the Commons and Art” roundtable (launch event, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, June 9, 2018).

[4] A comment I have encountered, unspecified like this, on too many occasions recently.

[5] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

[6] Sarah Ahmed, “Refusal, Resignation and Complaint,” feministkilljoys, (June 28, 2018): https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/06/28/refusal-resignation-and-complaint/

[7] E.g. E.C. Feiss, A Critique of Rights in “We Are Here” (Maastricht: Charles Nypels Lab, 2015).

[8] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

[9] Conversations with various friends and acquaintances who work in libraries indicate that numerical quantities of loans, stripped of any other information, are being used as the marker of success and value, at the level of the whole library, the performance of the individual librarian, and the worth and necessity to the collection of each individual book.

[10] I’m paraphrasing a private conversation here.

[katherinemacbride]

a response

Text written January 2018. For Romy Rüegger, Language is Skin: Scripts for Performances, Archive Books, Berlin, 2018.

https://www.archivebooks.org/2018/04/03/language-is-skinscripts-for-performancesby-romy-ruegger/

I’ve been asked to write a response for this publication. [1] I’m writing from the perspective of having witnessed some of Romy’s processes and performances, and having read these texts during their editing. What emerges is a response to a working method. 

Romy writes,

‘Words that move along – from one body to an other’

and later,

‘In the archives I do not find anything about you, the witnesses are all dead’.

I think Romy and I share a question.

How might we listen together to what cannot be heard, what is excluded, and cannot yet be expressed? 

Recently, I’ve been thinking about reparative listening; reparative not in a sense of gendered, racialised and classed caring labour fixing a broken system, but reparative in a sense of… Is there a point at which, if enough people listened differently, the system might collapse and something reparative emerge? These thoughts bring together theories, queer, critical, anti-racist, feminist. I read and listen but often struggle to articulate myself clearly, to find the language right there on the skin of my fingers. A friend has been making paintings of eyes and mouths on hands, asking one to imagine what the eye would know if it touched, what the hands could know if they allowed some kind of entry. I think perhaps that Romy has auditory passages opening on the ends of her fingers, openings allowing entry. I think of her reading in archives, gathering, accumulating, sifting, editing, assembling, reconstructing, stirring, taking things in to breathe them back out living; a circulation that is repeated when she asks the audience to move around as her body makes the space where they must listen to the carefully collected fragments of neglected and violently suppressed narratives. And the voice that speaks refuses to speak loudly, instead it insists, it demands… Come closer, listen more carefully, come so close that you have to touch and be affected.

*

A note to Romy and to you.

While we were reading we were writing. While we were listening we were writing. [2]

Editing is care work, editors are ‘caseworkers for the commons’ [3] editing the past into a common resource. Editing is additive, performative; speaking through. Being possessed. Having a mutable body that carries multivalently, simultaneously, in quantum spacetime. There is dirt on your fingers, on the skin of your words, as you sort through the archives. Artist. Editor. Feminised labour in many cases, including ours. 

Collecting: additions, specifics, eliminated materials. Banding together.

*

‘After all, totalitarian regimes do not impinge only upon concrete reality, but also upon this intangible reality of desire. It is an invisible, but no less relentless, violence.’ [4]

Careful seeking,

carefully seeking,

carefully, seekingly.

Writing a quiet voice thinking round the edges maybe, ‘the little edges.’ [5] 

Taking listening walks in your grounds, I ‘walk as if the soles of my feet were made of ears.’ [6]

Texts that were written to be spoken. This text was written as spoken, it was transcribed from your speech, indirectly. It notes the small refusals, it notes the large insertions, it notes the effort, it notes the care. The dirt on her fingers is accompanied by anger. Her voice carries it steadily, forcefully. Listen. She imagines on towards an equality through her writerly care, through how she focuses her attention, because there isn’t such an equality in discrimination.

She intends an interruption, another interruption, for she interrupts daily via her bodily non-reproduction, via her co-construction of networks of care, via her refusal and her excess. She is interrupting – ‘Unlearning, undoing, undergoing, white privilege, hopefully confronting, transforming and shifting attention’ [7] – in the loud, loud sounds of a contested now. A now that is everything that happened before and everything that might come.

(Turned inside or out, this she is plural. A many, a they, a we. A she-not-I-her, a me.) [8]

*

‘First of all, trauma, in Greek, means wound, injury and it comes from the verb titrosko – to pierce. However… It was found that the root verb is teiro “to rub” and, in this context, in ancient Greek it has two meanings: to rub in and to rub off, to rub away. Thus, according to the original definition, trauma is the mark left on a person as a result of something being rubbed onto him or her. Then, depending on the way that the rubbing took place there are two different outcomes. More specifically, when a powerful and intense experience is rubbed in or onto a person, the “trauma” could be either an injury (rubbed in) or a new life, where the person can start with a clean slate and with the previous priorities erased (rubbed off).’ [9]

I’m leaving these like this. Usually, it would be anybody, but any body speaks better of the medicalisation situation. With border line there is also the option to make it borderline, which is used in the name Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I’m not sure if this is something that you’re alluding to or not so I wanted to tell you this, that if you make it borderline, it also hardens the meaning of border line into something explicitly medical (and BPD is highly gendered, often a female diagnosis). I think you’re referring to bodies and borders in the sense of migration and racism and no borders and so on, but there is this desolate hospital that we’re in right now.

A world tangled up in words, bodies entangled in the material effects of violent discourses. This is where she points, where she inserts herself: amid the slippages, among the profusion of associations to take care of with each word written. ‘What opens up between two fields of language. A place in between. Between the inbetweens. Walking around in the inbetweens.’ [10]

*

The subject object distinction is broken. It is constructed to break black bodies for its own existence and needs to be destroyed. [11] We’re writing in English, the most violent existing language, trying to keep the distinction fluid because it is broken. You do what you can with what you’ve got. How to write in English about the voice that these texts were spoken in, the movements that mapped them out in space amongst bodies. How to write in German about the voices that were never written down, to speak them into English, to say them out loud.

‘In German “they” somehow would imply an implicit othering. In English this is not the case?’ [12]

My spellcheck corrects othering to mothering and bothering. I am satisfied with both of these forms of action brought together now as an inseparable pair. I remember hearing Fred Moten talk about reclaiming mothering from capitalist social reproduction. Interrupting again. Existing antagonistically. Caring is affirming the space you want to be in that doesn’t exist yet. But the word I intended to write is excluded from the normative structure of the computer dictionary.

It’s because you started with someone. In English you can use they as a gender neutral way of speaking about a person. Someone isn’t the same as one. This is tricky because using one makes the voice sound detached from the situation, a different form of separation. I used they, it’s more everyday so it puts the voice more in the situation. I’m not sure you can translate this concept of one very well where you can have a neutral subject that’s part of the whole. Maybe in English they depends a lot on the tone of use in how othering it is. But you’re right, it’s never mothering. I often use a second person you to keep the subject/object distinction between the reader and the subject open but you can’t do that here because of the previous paragraph…

‘Without “separability”, difference among human groups and between human and nonhuman entities, has very limited explanatory purchase and ethical significance.’ [13]

You want to destroy the whole thing.

*

Because what Romy is getting at with her careful readings and assembled texts is the very thing that evades language: trauma. Sexual violence, racial violence, class war. The circumstances are everywhere and always, the mechanisms of oppressions are various, the power relations intersect and diverge. People harming people by action and omission. And pain, as Elaine Scarry says, is outside of representation, so it is difficult to share. In amongst the trauma, between the rubble and the dust, Romy is listening for excess and possibilities for thinking differently, insisting that we join her. 

*

[1] Romy and I have worked together before, once in Zürich for Speaks with Silence, organised by Romy with Side Room and OOR, and once at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow where Romy made Reina Ilora Reads for an event, Undoing Listening, that I organised in 2017. At this second encounter, there was sign language interpretation, and Romy responded to this by incorporating the figure of the interpreter directly into the text and staging of her performance.

[2] While I was making watching you/Olive Michel and Fred Hystère perform Touching Tones with Tender Buttons in OOR Records, I was writing another text that is also this text. I wrote you an email afterwards. While I was projecting captions and watching you/Romy Rüegger perform Reina Ilora Reads with a sign language interpreter in Transmission Gallery, I was writing this text and another text that remains as yet unwritten. While I was reading your translations of the texts in this book and copy editing them, I was writing notes, some of which are in this text, along with notes that you wrote in return. There are quotes from your texts and from others here too.

[3]  Sarah Blackwood, Editing as Carework. The Gendered Labor of Public Intellectuals, 2014. avidly.lareviewofbooks.org

[4] Suely Rolnik, Deleuze, Schizoanalyst, in ‘e-flux journal’, issue 23, 2011.

[5]  Fred Moten, The Little Edges, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 2015.

[6] Misremembered line from Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations, Smith Publications, Sharon, 1971.

[7] Email exchange with Romy.

[8]  I’m responding here to a she that occurs in some of Romy’s scripts, a she who is sometimes, often, the writer but who also slips and switches between bodies, temporalities and identities. See Reina Ilora Reads, Are You an Underground?, E lei qui sottolinea and Reading Recorded Voices. This is not separate from histories of oracles, possession, ventriloquism and the everyday experiences of being a she.

[9]  Therapeutic Care for Refugees. No Place Like Home, R. K. Papadopoulos (ed.), Karnac Books, London, 2002.

[10] Romy Rüegger, ‘If You lived Here, You Would Already Be at Yours’. In Language is Skin: Scripts for Performances, Archive Books, Berlin, 2018.

[11] See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Hacking the Subject. Black Feminism, Refusal and the Limits of Critique, lecture at Barnard College in 2015.

[12] Email exchange with Romy.

[13] Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘On Difference Without Separability’, in 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. Incerteza Viva, J. Volz and J. Rebouças (eds.), Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016.

[katherinemacbride]

beginning with a writing in with a writing around

+++

‘Why are all the texts about feminism?’

So you breathe and you let the comment pass and you wait and you hope that the act of doing this thing together will make things clearer and at the end she talks to you and you think she got it and you can’t be sure but you hope so.

+++

‘We talk about what happens when the body drops out of the conversation.’  

'when terrible things happen they must be witnessed’

‘My future is written on my body.’

‘the intimacy of scrutiny’

(carol gilligan, juliana spahr, alison kafer, audre lorde)

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‘I have selected different types of fragments for re-print, that I am putting in relationship with each other, as is often the case in my practice. So that the cumulative sum of these things, words, ideas, somehow proposes something that each part alone could not; through this I speak, not so much through an individual authorial voice, but also through a multiplicity of voices. To try to say something, I try to think, and find my position through collecting and navigating through material; I also try and make work that speaks in the same way, that works by articulating a complexity of material, explicitly in both form and content. Perhaps this is a way of doing things that creates close ties and connections between things, people, and myself, and that is something that more often than not has the feel of a friendship of sorts. I work by spending time with things I have collected, the references that I carry along, like friendly voices in my head, the numerous voices that are part of the process of thinking through and developing work — of friends, acquaintances and peers — but which also include the essential voices of inspirational thinkers from the past, that populate our thoughts and conversations and are in this way, also present.’ 

(celine condorelli) 

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if you can imagine it it becomes possible right?

(I’ve been hanging onto this one since spring since reading marge piercy’s beautiful future where reparations have been paid and everyone has three mothers and men lactate and resources are shared through a process of careful listening and the earth has a representative and difference is celebrated.)

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‘Reading:

Books are a companion species.

reading done generously and receptively and promiscuously, reading as submission, reading as non-monogamy and resisting the notion that we must be married to any particular thought style/theory/philosophy

reading as polyamory: haven't we all had so many lovers and don't we continue to yearn for more???

reading as insatiable desire, as taking in more than one, reading as being more than one

reading as scission, reading as torsion, reading as suture

reading as lust

reading as tactile, as fingering the pages with pleasure and anticipation, reading as eroticopolitics

reading as showing the fiction of the subject/object distinction and their relation of interplay

reading as entanglement, as ontology, as being with, as becoming, as world(s)ing, as dividual, as beyond the threshold(s), as touching feeling

reading as play and exchange, reading as willing, reading as vulnerability, reading as opening and stretching, reading as anality, reading as hole because there's no Whole, reading as non-sovereign, reading as virality, as contagion reading as transmission, reading as transference, as being both analyst and analysand, as projection and introjection

reading as being a bossy bottom: pleasure of text indeed’

(che gosset)

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He stopped and pushed back hard at the very moment you asked him to consider that his body was also merely possible and not actual. Come join the rest of us you fucker. And you, yes you, look askance then roll your eyes when she holds the mic and gathers her thoughts. The power of a pause.

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[katherinemacbride]

gift

e the gift de das gift nl het gif

i always like this muddling of etymologies in germanic languages resulting in poison being inextricable from gift giving. in the uk where i grew up where we say gift and we don’t mean poison, gift giving nevertheless implies a set of social relations that can be toxic,

duty and obligation and debt are often implied,

shame and failure are integral

i like how in french gifts come from somewhere more abstract - on m’a offert un

cadeautje

dutch borrows from french like english with a tendency to dutchify, that it doesn’t do when it borrows from english

english doesn’t borrow from dutch perhaps because in old scots the languages come very close sometimes, too close for comfort when asserting disconnectedness, no need for the gifts of others, others are giftig, no acknowledgment of the poison spread through the world with the colonial violence that accompanies the english language

there is an agnes martin painting called friendship that is made of gold leaf and glitters joyfully at the viewer, all those careful moments of contact between her and the material making their way into the room,

she named another painting gratitude, now gratitude is not a very cool idea, it’s a bit mixed up with religiosity which is a shame because i feel very grateful to friends and strangers for keeping me alive, thankful towards the air i breathe and the fact that some of the matter in the universe comes together in a form that i call planet earth that i am part of

not forgetting the difficulty of sharing because this existing and thankfulness is embedded with painfulness and thieving and expropriation and murder

eve kosofsky sedgwick is someone who knew a lot about living life understanding death and complexity.

quote: a part of my motive…has been to explore how one complex and protracted historical crime, the holding of African and African-decended slaves in the western hemisphere, gored its mark (highly differentially) on the modes of meaning that were possible for anyone in its periperformative ambit, whether european or african-descended, and in the old world as well as the new. Specifically, I have been supposing that during the time of slavery, and for an uncircumscribable time after its abolition probably extending beyond the present, the cluster of ostentatiously potent linguistic acts that have been grouped loosely, since j l austin, under the rubric of ‘performatives’ must be understood continually in relation to the exemplary instance of slavery.

[katherinemacbride]

Slowly and quickly, too fast, at my desk, in bed, in relation.

When I read signs and labels and websites around me in Greece, I spell out the letters aloud very very slowly, and I most remind myself of being a child spelling out words on signs when I was learning to read.

When I read things aloud to myself, I understand them in a more intuitive way because the pace of reading is slower and I can feel the shape of the language more physically through my breath.

When I read novels in bed in the evening, I usually can’t stay awake for more than a page.

When I read French, I use neural networks that grew when I was a teenager and I think about how else I might have lived if I’d moved to France when I was eighteen.

When I read Dutch or German, I am comfortable with not really understanding in a detailed way, but with having an understanding that is more about the shapes and feel of the language: a different kind of understanding and meaning.

When I read the news, I often read it on my phone in bed, buses and trains, and I notice that this makes me skim read more, and that I can’t always remember statistics or names or events that have been referenced in the article.

When I read something that I find hard, I write a lot of notes in the margins which are me telling myself what the sentences are saying.

When I read poetry I read slowly and quickly, too fast, at my desk in moments of doubt.

When I read without taking notes, I have to keep reminding myself that I’ve chosen to have that kind of reading experience that day and to enjoy it, to be with the text, rather than attempt to extract something tangible from it to my memory.

When I read novels in bed in the morning, sometimes I can’t get up, it’s so compulsive.

When I read for reading groups, I often find myself in public places reading, with intent, cramming or luxuriating, but somehow knowing I will think about the text in public makes me look at it in public, as if something particular about being with people matters.

When I read about people being kind when I am hormonal, sometimes I cry, as I do if people are kind in real life when I am hormonal.

When I read things that people I know have written, I get shivers of excitement that come from both the recognition and the strangeness of experiencing them as a different person, and I feel wonderment at the intricacies of people and how we can only ever know each other partially and moment to moment.

When I read things that I love, I can start to feel an emotional relationship with the writer and call them by their first name.

When I read about sex, I secrete.

When I read things I really really love, I have to read them slowly because each sentence strikes me so hard that I want to linger and luxuriate in its reverberations.

When I read certain texts with certain friends, I feel like reading sustains friendships in unexpected ways.

When I read things I really really really love, I sometimes have to write them out in handwriting to feel closer to them and I think this is trying to understand them through intimate contact stretched in time between them and my body.

When I read the poems of Sonia Sanchez, I hear them in her voice, and I tingle thinking of how hearing her voice in real life made me cry wet wet tears, in recognition of the intensity of love she was describing, and in subsequent awareness of feelings of loss that perhaps I would never experience that intensity again.

When I read things I have written, sometimes I am transported back in time to greet another moment of myself and sometimes I feel like an alien wrote it, such is the dis-recognition.

When I read text messages from my mum, I think how little I know her in writing because this is a recent development in our communication, and then I think how much easier it is for me to really listen to her though this medium and how much more of her personality I can access through her written descriptions.

When I read theory that appeals to me, I find myself overusing key words or forms of phrasing in texts I write in the time afterwards, and, when I read these texts later, I feel a cringe of embarrassment, but I also know that this repetition is me still reading and trying to understand what I have read.

When I read about pain, I know I can’t understand it really, and I am thankful for the efforts of the writer to help me come closer to this impossibility than I could otherwise because there is still much to learn from this kind of closeness.

When I read Lyn Hejinian’s the rejection of closure, I think about how little I know about writing.

When I read Joan Retallack’s rethinking:literary:feminism, I understand why I try to write sometimes.

When I read Anne Boyer I feel greedy and in a rush and afterwards I feel stupid for missing so much in my haste.

When I read Lisa Robertson, I can only do a page at a time because it is so intense, as spoon fruits eaten in the smallest quantities are, or as umami sauces based on anchovies and marmite and soy sauce are, with bodyfeels that last into the next day — memories of sensations in tastebuds and sentences piercing skin and awareness, mouths watering, brain cells colliding.

When I read emails from one friend, I think about how we only know each other from a reading group, how she introduced me to some important books, and how easy it feels to write quite intensely and openly with each other on the basis of this.

When I read Michel Foucault, I feel endless, apart from in regard to environmental degradation, because he so lays bare the lie of progression through time as improvement.

When I read Sappho, I understand that ancient peoples felt things, not the same things perhaps but not unrecognisable things, and experienced joy and pain.

When I read Sylvia Federici, I feel angry and sad at how old the shame I carry is.

When I read Sara Ahmed’s blog I get energy to push on.

When I read the email that an emerging friend wrote me in the summer after I opened myself with unusual honesty and neediness to become vulnerable to this stranger, I feel acceptance and trust and think I can feel the universe expanding.

When I read, I think about how Denise Ferreira da Silva talks about reading as writing, being open to being changed in order to be able to write.

When I read I am aware of how partially I can ever understand anything.

When I read I am thinking and learning.

When I read I am in relation with you.

[katherinemacbride]

That Mouth

That Mouth can’t hear; does taste and breathe. Those ears hear. That Mouth. Those ears. Here, whispering. The proximity needed to listen to low frequencies. Uncertainties, embarrassments, embraces. All that has been silenced.

SILENCE NOT ABSENCE At the club they attacked queer people, violently. You were upset. I was angry but a stranger and I can fear my anger so I stayed too quiet when you told me.

Dody wrote, Perhaps it’s natural for my students to shut down, push it away. The urge to shut down and push away discomfort is strong in all of us. How else do we survive the day to day horrors and erosions of what artist Gregg Bordowitz calls ‘our proto-facist moment’.

Audre spoke, Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognise her role as vital within that transformation.

How might we listen to what is silenced? Make its vibrations felt everywhere as well as in particularly complex bodies at particular moments. Shake those feelings into uncomplicated bodies with more mouths than ears.

Marge Piercy describing Audre Lorde wrote,

Obsidian, the obvious: it can take an edge, can serve as a knife in ritual or in combat, as your fine dark deep voice could pour out love, could take an edge like a machete.

When my sister falls I will pick up her weapons, Essex Hemphill almost wrote.

I want to stop being silenced by anger.

*

Does the memory of kin you never even knew leave its own implacable trail upon the very texture and fabric of your body, growing as you grow to imprint itself upon your every move?

Lisa said to me that time, Giving yourself permission to inhabit spaces where you don’t understand also allows other people to experience that too. It’s ok to inhabit temporarily and return to the meta-discourse on and on and deeper — inhabiting not understanding would be irresponsible if done too long but doing it a bit allows play and unknown forms to emerge.

it was very difficult

the unconscious is not structured like a language

*

no justice, no peace

Anna the geographer would always ask then, and what is justice? Who is making the calculation? He asked how you could imagine a finitude to reparations and I was thinking where would you even begin.

no justice, no peace

fuck clarity, my mess is desired, desiring, I’d rather meet you there than in violence, your anger doesn’t scare me any more and neither will mine, domestic abuse no longer makes me silent, I sing

*

If only we could like each other raw.

and you and I and we do

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

and you and I and we do

*

Quotes in italics, in order of appearance: Adrienne Rich, That Mouth Dodi Bellamy, Body Language Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action Marge Piercy, Elegy In Rock, For Audre Lorde Essex Hemphill, When my brother fell Amiel Alcalay, weighing the losses, like stones in your hand Lisa Robertson, notes taken by Katherine MacBride during a conversation on 02/02/15 Felix Guattari, Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities Anna McLauchlan, question posed at many conference panels during five years of friendship Marge Piercy, What are big girls made of? Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Love Poems