ICI Berlin
Refine
Year of publication
- 2020 (15) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (15)
Language
- English (15)
Has Fulltext
- yes (15) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (15)
Keywords
- Weathering (6)
- Kunst (5)
- Verwitterung (5)
- Exposure (4)
- Wetter (3)
- Arendt, Hannah (2)
- Chachkhiani, Vajiko (2)
- Enantiosemy (2)
- Geologie (2)
- Klima (2)
What is the effect of weathering in a confined space? What if this space is the bathroom of the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo? Writer Mario Bellatin and photographer Graciela Iturbide venture into this once intimate room and through a series of artistic interventions breathe new life into it. The logic of the archive is their guiding principle: in order to preserve what has been locked away and stored, it must be exposed and put to new uses.
Over the six months in which Vajiko Chachkhiani's "Living Dog Among Dead Lions" was exhibited at the Georgian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, heavy rain was pouring inside the installation. This artificially generated process provokes thoughts on the nature of the here and now as well as of the afterlife and of the future appearance of the hut's water-sensitive insides. Eventually, the spaces and furniture exposed to rain and water stagnation will begin to rot and disintegrate, and mould and moss might grow over them. Its viewers feel caught between what they see and what they hope to see; between their perceptions and expectations, in an exceptional time zone where 'natural' weathering is being performed as a subject of meditative observation.
This chapter explores the intrinsic relationship between weather/weathering and the imaginary of the sea, which features in the work of artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário. Bispo was a black man who spent most of his life in psychiatric institutions. There is an important interplay between his psychotic deliriums and the production of hundreds of objects, many of them ships or forms that relate to the sea. These objects open up a discussion on decoloniality as they are embedded with marks left by the transatlantic slave trade.
This essay restages Arendt's 'Auseinandersetzung' with Heidegger regarding 'political beginnings'. Sketching Heidegger's exceptionalist account of 'new beginnings' and Arendt's dispute with him in relation to the tension between the spheres of 'philosophy' and 'politics', I trace her position about 'political founding'. I claim that Arendt invites us to recognize the 'principle of an-archy' innate to 'political beginnings', which cannot be absorbed by exceptionalist invocations of the 'history of Being'.
Following Hannah Arendt's remarks on refugee camps as spaces of 'worldlessness', I examine how, in films on European asylum facilities, systemic violence 'makes itself known' in images of nature. Nature separates and isolates ("La Forteresse", "Forst"), it constitutes a sphere of domination and control ("View from Above"), and it functions directly as a murder weapon ("Purple Sea"). Nature, in these films, indicates the Outside within, haunted by the latent and ghostly presence of systemic violence.
This chapter argues that paying attention to the weather and its associated processes of geological, biological, and social weathering can destabilize knowledge traditions that insist on dichotomies. Looking to specific histories and current conditions in Guyana and Suriname, this chapter shows how notions of weathering can accommodate a wide range of referents, ranging from the weathering of rock to socio-political and historical afterlives of violent colonial displacements.
The essay confronts the question of weathering by considering its excess to the conceptual dimension and relating it to what Jacques Derrida names (the) 'trace'. The study of the 'logic' of weathering/the trace is confronted with Giorgio Agamben's critique of Derrida's project. Their two different conceptions of language, of its presuppositional structure, and of its order of 'metaphysical presence' are considered, in particular by turning to Werner Hamacher's work on these and related matters.
Enduring ornament
(2020)
This is an essay about rust. Iron usually plays the part of strength, stubbornness, and impenetrability, but rust registers the dimension of time in the material, reminding us that it always carries the potential for its own decomposition. While great expense is incurred to stave off iron's oxidization, we read the uselessness that rust precipitates as an interruption of the instrumental logics that sustain racial capitalism. Looking to the rusted ring that became Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's "Enduring Ornament" (1913), we consider how the discarded and defunctionalized lend themselves to ornamental redeployment. The essay then turns to works by the contemporary American artists David Hammons and Andrea Fraser, both of which transform Richard Serra's rusty steel sculptures into a backdrop for fleeting gestures of impromptu reclamation. Attending to questions of susceptibility and monumental weathering, these reflections look to rusty leakages that play out the impossibility of refusing the environment. Rust, we suggest, is a material archive of exposure that does not keep itself, but flakes apart and seeps away.
One of the theoretical tensions that has arisen from Anthropocene studies is what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the 'two figures of the human', and the question of which of these two figures of the human inheres in the concept of the Anthropocene more. On the one hand, the Human is conceived as the universal reasoning subject upon whom political rights and equality are based, and on the other hand, humankind is the collection of all individuals of our species, with all of the inequalities, differences, and variability inherent in any species category. This chapter takes up Deborah Coen's argument that Chakrabarty's claim of the 'incommensurability' of these two figures of the human ignores the way both were constructed within debates over how to relate local geophysical specificities to theoretical generalities. This chapter examines two cases in the history of science. The first is Martin Rudwick's historical exploration of how geologists slowly gained the ability to use fossils and highly local stratigraphic surveys to reconstruct the history of the Earth in deep time, rather than resort to speculative cosmological theory. The second is Coen's own history of imperial, Austrian climate science, a case where early nineteenth-century assumptions about the capriciousness of the weather gave way to theories of climate informed by thermodynamics and large-scale data collection.
The essay investigates the meteorological phenomena represented in Dante Alighieri's Commedia and their interrelation with the subjectivity of the dead in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Examining how the dead weather the afterlife and how the elements affect them, in turn, the essay takes the complex enantiosemy of the word 'weathering' as a conceptual guiding thread for the exploration of dynamics of exposure ('Inferno'), vulnerability ('Purgatorio'), and receptivity ('Paradiso').
Radiating exposures
(2020)
The brief explorations of radiation exposures presented within this essay draw primarily from nuclear art and culture and contribute to the field of nuclear aesthetics, which has long been fixated on the problem of visibility and the representation of nuclear residues. The examples draw primarily from photographic technologies and other aesthetic registers that capture visual residues of radiation. The challenges of nuclear aesthetics are also political and social. This constellation of objects and inquiries is meant to explore the fraught political, environmental, and social relations between radiation, visibility, toxicity, through the concept of exposure. They offer feminist glimpses into other ways of thinking exposure, as it develops in relation to (often imperceptible) toxicity that is not inscribed into a logic that partitions the passive victim of suffering from some pure or unaffected subject. They are examples that are both forms of exposure specific to the nuclear while also, perhaps, helping to expose more nuanced and complex ways of understanding forms of exposure that extend beyond nuclearity.
The chapter engages the nature-culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human's fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which 'weathering' can involve subject-object relations, objectless subject-predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.
Preface
(2020)
The intensifying ecological devastation of the planet is being registered across scientific disciplines and activist, artistic, or more broadly cultural endeavours in ways that rethink the temporal dimensions of a catastrophe that can no longer be considered 'looming'. In many political contexts - trying to get scientists heard, mobilizing state power and international agreements to curb the extractivist rapaciousness of global capitalism - it might still seem essential to create a sense of urgency, of a rapidly closing interval, last chance, now or never. Yet taking stock not only of the planetary sum totals of global climate change but its present local manifestations, the devastations of neocolonial extractivism, the irreversible extinctions of countless species, destruction of ecotopes on land and in the sea, has produced a growing awareness that in many crucial senses, it is 'too late' - that the time can no longer be given as 'five minutes to midnight' but has moved a lot closer to the dead of night, whether this is being regarded primarily as a question of the cumulative loss of biodiversity as part of what is now known as the 'sixth mass extinction' or as the approach of several 'tipping points' of global climate change, such as the current ice sheet disintegrations in the polar regions, the greenhouse gas release triggered by the loss of permafrost, and irreversible desertifications. The complexion of ecology, over these last years, has turned from juicy green to dark and brittle. The most decisive recent interventions, while acknowledging the overwhelming pessimist thrust of ecological thought, have tried to use a more complex, more differentiated account of the temporality of environmental ruination in order to reflect on the diminished possibilities for life in these ruins while avoiding familiar registers both of science fiction dystopias and self-healing planets.