“Intra-actions contain transformative encounters, seductive moments that generate new modes of coexistence.”
– Kirksey, Eben. 2015. ‘Multispecies Intra-Actions’. Antennae, Problem 32:5.
In 2022 I used to be invited as Visitor Curator at LABVERDE Speculative Ecologies residency within the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The expertise has been one in every of transformation and re-attunement.
With a full embodiment within the climate as a complete expertise, to cite feminist cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, the entire sensorial capabilities develop into attuned to the setting. We develop into immersed. “To breathe means to be immersed in a medium that penetrates us with the identical depth as we penetrate it”, writes thinker Emanuele Coccia. Thus, it’s by being immersed that we study to look in any other case, to listen to in any other case and to really feel have an effect on(ed) in any other case.
What does it imply to be and apply as a part of an setting which is in fixed flux, the place modifications and transformation are activated by dwelling types which can be inside us and out of doors us? Being immersed requires a brand new relational perspective, the place people, animals, bugs, crops, water, climate develop into a multiplicity of prospects, brokers for change and transformation of the setting we share, we look after, and we’re response-able to.
Being immersed is the shared expertise of all of the artists from the Artwork for the Atmosphere (AER) exhibition. Supported by the AER worldwide residency programme on the UAL, they’d the chance to analysis and apply whereas been immersed within the Amazon rainforest, within the Norfolk price, within the desert Almeria area in Spain, within the Pre-Alps valleys in Italy and within the French countryside. They’ve been a part of balanced ecosystems (though dangerously reaching the tipping level), extremely numerous, multi-species, advanced, and but affective methods of cohabitation, co-operation, and intra-action, at all times in motion, at all times in course of.
The time period ‘intra-actions’ was first coined in 1996 by American feminist theorist Karen Barad and has been extensively used since, for it affords a solution to escape a topic/object dualism and hierarchical perspective on human interplay with all different types of life.
The artwork tasks developed through the AER residencies are generated in a strategy of multispecies collaboration, negotiation, and appreciation. Collaborations are by no means enforced, whereas all beings act as brokers of change in a creative course of, opening up new prospects, reworking relations and situations (in) which all of us reside.
Go to the Artwork for the Atmosphere exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, Norfolk, from 16 March – 8 June 2024. All of the works are realised with help from UAL’s Artwork for the Atmosphere Residency Programme.
