In the context of anthropogenic climate change, this article critiques the prevalence of ocularce... more In the context of anthropogenic climate change, this article critiques the prevalence of ocularcentric strategies, such as spectacular large-scale artworks and data visualizations, questioning the epistemological assumptions underpinning them. The author proposes Tarot, a dialogical practice unfolding through a deck of cards, often used for divination or occult purposes, as a valuable method for addressing the cognitive and affective messiness of climate crisis. This article examines three socially engaged art practices centring Tarot-James Leonard's The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies (2017-), Adelita Husni-Bey's The Reading/La Seduta (2017) and Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri's poethical readings (2015-). These case studies advance an understanding of Tarot as affective cartography, foregrounding the embodied and interpretive labour of negotiating connections across different crises and contradictions. Tarot provides a social context to experiment with new possibilities, unsettling 'rational' habits of thought and rethinking the practice of 'making sense' in the uneven Anthropocene.
In this article, I propose a method of worldmaking that is attentive to the value of mess. I appr... more In this article, I propose a method of worldmaking that is attentive to the value of mess. I approach mess in two ways. First, I take up 'mess' to refer to surplus: the excessive and illegible material that is left out of authoritative historical narratives. Second, I want to critique the use of mess in a pejorative register, to accuse someone of being wrong or distorting something; to make a mess or mess things up. I find messy affinities in Saidiya Hartman's book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which uncovers the rebellion of young black girls and gender nonconforming people in Philadelphia and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. She explains how the legal category of 'waywardness' was strategically deployed to capture and contain young women under the guise of 'imminent criminality.' Hartman flips the term into a fervent practice of freedom, "an avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police" (2019: 227). Waywardness is anarchistic but it is also more than anarchism. As Hartman writes, "only a misreading of the key texts of anarchism could ever imagine a place for colored girls" (230). This quote invites tracing the paths of subjects whose encounters with anarchism (and other political struggles) are framed with a negative prefix: as misunderstanding, misinterpreting, misreading. I want to suggest that a distortion of anarchism is precisely what is necessary for leading us to lost comrades and developing a more generative, a messier framework for what anarchism can be. However, as Kathy E. Ferguson argues, the familiar canonical version of anarchism is itself a distortion, skewing favor to those with the power to publish (2011: 265). So, what I am doing, in solidarity with those who have been vilified as messy or whose activities have been consigned to the murky hinterland of political struggle, is a kind of corrective misrepresentation, distorting the distortion. To embrace mess as a method is to begin uncovering the vibrant textures of lives and worlds that were never permitted to flourish.
Over the last decade, there has been rising interest in speculative fiction in contemporary art p... more Over the last decade, there has been rising interest in speculative fiction in contemporary art practice. These practices are appearing in a context where the future is being contested through resurgent patriarchal nationalism, ongoing settler-colonialism and the uneven distribution of environmental crisis. This thesis examines a group of artistic practices that use speculative fiction to navigate these spatial and geopolitical complexities: Pussy Riot, Larissa Sansour, Nicoline van Harskamp and Adelita Husni-Bey. Each artist responds to a specific context and builds on a different branch of the speculative, from magic and witchcraft to feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism. The outcome, I argue, is a revitalised anarcha-feminist subjectivity that is critical and creative enough for the present. This is mapped through a suite of speculative figures that straddle fiction and activism—holy fools, witches, healers, terrorists, pirates, and time-travellers, to name a few. Drawing on...
In the context of anthropogenic climate change, this article critiques the prevalence of ocularce... more In the context of anthropogenic climate change, this article critiques the prevalence of ocularcentric strategies, such as spectacular large-scale artworks and data visualizations, questioning the epistemological assumptions underpinning them. The author proposes Tarot, a dialogical practice unfolding through a deck of cards, often used for divination or occult purposes, as a valuable method for addressing the cognitive and affective messiness of climate crisis. This article examines three socially engaged art practices centring Tarot-James Leonard's The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies (2017-), Adelita Husni-Bey's The Reading/La Seduta (2017) and Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri's poethical readings (2015-). These case studies advance an understanding of Tarot as affective cartography, foregrounding the embodied and interpretive labour of negotiating connections across different crises and contradictions. Tarot provides a social context to experiment with new possibilities, unsettling 'rational' habits of thought and rethinking the practice of 'making sense' in the uneven Anthropocene.
In this article, I propose a method of worldmaking that is attentive to the value of mess. I appr... more In this article, I propose a method of worldmaking that is attentive to the value of mess. I approach mess in two ways. First, I take up 'mess' to refer to surplus: the excessive and illegible material that is left out of authoritative historical narratives. Second, I want to critique the use of mess in a pejorative register, to accuse someone of being wrong or distorting something; to make a mess or mess things up. I find messy affinities in Saidiya Hartman's book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which uncovers the rebellion of young black girls and gender nonconforming people in Philadelphia and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. She explains how the legal category of 'waywardness' was strategically deployed to capture and contain young women under the guise of 'imminent criminality.' Hartman flips the term into a fervent practice of freedom, "an avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police" (2019: 227). Waywardness is anarchistic but it is also more than anarchism. As Hartman writes, "only a misreading of the key texts of anarchism could ever imagine a place for colored girls" (230). This quote invites tracing the paths of subjects whose encounters with anarchism (and other political struggles) are framed with a negative prefix: as misunderstanding, misinterpreting, misreading. I want to suggest that a distortion of anarchism is precisely what is necessary for leading us to lost comrades and developing a more generative, a messier framework for what anarchism can be. However, as Kathy E. Ferguson argues, the familiar canonical version of anarchism is itself a distortion, skewing favor to those with the power to publish (2011: 265). So, what I am doing, in solidarity with those who have been vilified as messy or whose activities have been consigned to the murky hinterland of political struggle, is a kind of corrective misrepresentation, distorting the distortion. To embrace mess as a method is to begin uncovering the vibrant textures of lives and worlds that were never permitted to flourish.
Over the last decade, there has been rising interest in speculative fiction in contemporary art p... more Over the last decade, there has been rising interest in speculative fiction in contemporary art practice. These practices are appearing in a context where the future is being contested through resurgent patriarchal nationalism, ongoing settler-colonialism and the uneven distribution of environmental crisis. This thesis examines a group of artistic practices that use speculative fiction to navigate these spatial and geopolitical complexities: Pussy Riot, Larissa Sansour, Nicoline van Harskamp and Adelita Husni-Bey. Each artist responds to a specific context and builds on a different branch of the speculative, from magic and witchcraft to feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism. The outcome, I argue, is a revitalised anarcha-feminist subjectivity that is critical and creative enough for the present. This is mapped through a suite of speculative figures that straddle fiction and activism—holy fools, witches, healers, terrorists, pirates, and time-travellers, to name a few. Drawing on...
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