Arika’s Episode 11 brings together five days of film, music, discussion, and study to consider other ways of existing and conceiving of existence—arrayed against the ecological and social devastations of a capitalistic, colonial worldview that has been obliterating other worlds for over 400 years. Dalia Maini exchanges with Arika‘s co-director and founding member Barry Esson, about the underlying curatorial theme.
We live in times where political projects that seek to put an end to many worlds reappear repeatedly, in a ghostly form reminiscent of historical déjà vu. What has gone wrong in our historical unconscious for this cycle to keep recurring? And what is the responsibility of art and culture in this?
I question how much trust we should place in the idea of history if it implies a kind of linearity. I resonate with Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of the “ancestral present.” The catastrophe we are facing is not something looming just beyond the horizon of social and environmental collapse; it is an ancestral catastrophe, both past and present, that has been unfolding for centuries, particularly impacting racialized and Indigenous peoples.
Following Elizabeth’s perspective, one issue that might have gone "wrong" in our history is how European Enlightenment thinkers developed ways of understanding the world that legitimized Europe’s practices of total violence against its colonies. In other words, a worldview was constructed to retrospectively justify violence, rather than the other way around. By measuring all forms of existence according to the presumed qualities of this European, ontologically violent, imposed form of existence, racialized and Indigenous peoples—who possess their own “analytics of existence” (in Elizabeth’s terms) that “refuse the Western need to differentiate between things with or without agency, subjectivity, intentionality, or what counts as life”—are cast as having more in common with the land and as being less than human, as “non-life” or “savages,” and thus open to exploitation, extraction, enslavement, or death. Aileen Moreton-Robinson powerfully critiques this dynamic through the concept of the “white possessive,” whereby “the settler state’s gift of self-determination is a demand that Indigenous people mimic the psychosis at the heart of Western liberalism, namely the fantasy of a sovereign body that determines itself, has final say over its use and the use of things within it—that speaks based on its sovereign self-possession.”
Western and European art and culture, as they are recuperated into normative society, continue to emerge from this specific notion of subjectivity. They contribute back to its formation: they are both products of and machines for producing subjectivity, personhood, and individuation or for manufacturing consent to be a single person (to riff on Fred Moten riffing on Edouard Glissant).
fig.1
With the re-emergence of fascism in the Global North, public spaces have become sites where the power of propaganda is violently displayed. How does Episode 11 aim to critically reimagine these within the arts, particularly when addressing themes of resistance and Indigenous cosmologies?
We don’t claim to reimagine spaces within the arts. Our relationship to "the arts" and to what constitutes public space within them is ambivalent. For us, "the arts" is a site of resources that we attempt, with varying success, to use for our purposes and those of our friends, comrades, and allies. I’m not sure how well we accomplished this, other than knowing we could always do it better.
When I think about space, I find Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the "trialectics of space" compelling—the idea that space is produced through the intersection of three realms: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived. I interpret the perceived as encompassing aesthetic registers, feelings, senses, and so forth; the conceived as relating to thought; and the lived as relating to sociality. We aim, within Episodes, to engage with this way of thinking by creating social spaces that include perceived (experiential), conceived (discursive, theoretical), and lived (social, ethical, “political”) elements. We also strive to consider how these registers produce space as we shape the social space of each Episode, which I view as a practice somewhere between inviting, sharing, hosting, fostering openness, and cultivating "access intimacy."
fig.2
Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-imperialist voices, people who have suffered and are keeping witness to the dystopian project of Western colonialism, resulting in contemporary imperialism welcome the end of this world if ruled and shaped in such a way. How does the program facilitate the coming of a post-end-of-the-world horizon?
“the participants welcome the end of this world if ruled and shaped in such a way,” I think that’s right. There’s a nice quote about the end of the world by Ailton Krenak.
When I talk about postponing the end of the world, I'm not referring to the collapse of this world. I wish this violent world would disappear at midnight tonight, and that tomorrow we wake up in a new one. However, in reality, we are acting on the prospect of transfiguration, desiring what Nêgo Bispo calls confluences, and not that exorbitant euphoria of monoculture that gathers the crazies who celebrate necropolitics rather than the plural life of the peoples on this planet. Unlike what they are doing, confluences evoke the context of diverse worlds that can affect each other.
This WhatsApp message from Denise Ferreira da Silva also addresses this:
Here are some of the things regarding the phrase “the end of the world as we know it”: it is about the end of the known world, the world state: capital in all its apparitions and the modes of knowing (scientific and historical) that support its colonial (extractive, expropriative, genocidal) practices and propositions and promises (of development, of freedom, etc, which are all contingent on total violence). That means that other modes of knowing and more importantly as other ways of existing and of conceiving of existence (of everything human and nonhuman) must be imagined/ imaginable, experimented/ rehearsed, and supported by any means necessary. The end of the world as we know it would bring the end of ‘world’ itself, and with that of phenomenology and of the thing it consolidates, subjectivity, which is the thing that defines itself in/ as knowledge. To end the world as we know it is to exist otherwise right here/now. Denise Ferreira da Silva
So to answer your question (How does the program facilitate the coming of a post-end-of-the-world horizon?)…
I think the things Episode can begin to explore, within the modest capacities we have, include examining different perspectives on what constitutes worlds, ways of knowing worlds, and how the dominant worldview has come to be understood—even down to the level of the subject, as Denise says. This includes considering the impacts of that worldview and the questions it raises for militant practices. We also aim to invite and learn from other ways of knowing the world, or worlds, along with the ethics and commitments these entail, which refuse the status and supposed protection of being a "subject"—that which has been denied to them.
This is not to suggest that any particular community (especially communities whose worlds Europe has been dismantling for centuries) bears the responsibility to teach us in Glasgow/Scotland/Europe how to end the world we brought into being; that’s something we have to figure out ourselves.
There is a fundamental distrust in artistic languages today, due to their compromise with neoliberal economic regimes and institutions. Yet, I want to believe we are at a nexus where artists and cultural practitioners are called to rethink the environments they are part of, starting from their very structures and to, as Sylvia Wynter would put it, shape sociogenic forces.
We try to think about the aesthetic registers of sociality—a concept we draw from thinkers like Laura Harris and Fred Moten, among others. So, perhaps instead of focusing on art forms, we want to consider and engage with the ways groups look and wish to be seen, feel and wish to be felt, listen and wish to be heard, move and wish to be moved. I know this sounds poetic; that’s part of the point. These registers reveal a kind of inseparability between aesthetics and our ethical engagement with the world. They provide a way for us to carve out some room to maneuver. We are constantly renegotiating boundaries with the art world, the music scene, the dance and theater worlds, and the structures that support them. We draw resources from these worlds while trying not to be over-determined by their liberal agendas. I’m not sure how successful we are at this; we simply try to remain within the contradictions.
As Indigenous thinkers in Brazil have proposed, the epistemic diversity of the world is potentially infinite. The end of certain worlds, brought about by colonialism over the last 400 years, certainly included the attempted eradication of certain ways of knowing the world. As Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson discuss in Rehearsals for Living—
As Imperialism and ongoing colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence, and Indigenous and Black peoples have been building worlds and then rebuilding worlds for as long as we have been in existence. Relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss. Building worlds and living in them anyway.
Thinking about loss: whether or to what extent different epistemologies are truly lost, and for whom they are lost. For example, in Ligia Lewis’s incredible A Plot, A Scandal, she is haunted by the spirit of her grandmother, Lolón Zapata, who courted scandal by using her plot of land to practice the Afro-Dominican spiritual tradition of Palo. There are still people who practice Palo today, but perhaps that practice has been “lost” to people like Ligia, whose family has a history of emigration and return. One of the remarkable aspects of Ligia’s film is how she addresses this potential “loss” and explores what it might mean for her to remember her grandmother’s practice. She finds ways to do so under the consuming white gaze and within a system of representation (dance, theater), fully aware that political representation was developed as a regulatory response to the radical anti-colonial insurgency. She poses the question of how we remember and learn to desire something beyond personhood, something other than being represented.
fig.3
The visual load of information delivered on our screens is the primary way we absorb the genocides and ecocides occurring in the world, leading to a sensory overload that obstructs action. In curating a learning environment made up of performances, screenings, workshops, and talks, how do you envision audiences engaging with the experimental approaches presented in Episode 11?
We are interested in what we can learn from aesthetic registers of sociality, and how those can support our collective ethical comportment in the world. These registers can be engaged at different levels. Perhaps we are attempting to offer a range of these registers of experience, each supporting different perspectives, understandings, or feelings: a musical performance, a discussion, a study session, or a workshop for a small group. Each of these has a different degree of publicness, personal safety, exposure, or risk; a different sensory, intellectual, or emotional experience; and different ways to move between the local and the global, the typical and the archetypical, the personal and the collective. This back-and-forth between perspectives is something we affirmed by working with Fernando Zalamea and engaging with his thinking on Topos theory. Here’s an excerpt from an essay I wrote on Fernando’s ideas:
Topoi
A sheaf is a point of view. But we can take all the sheaves on a space—all possible points of view—and integrate them together. This gives us a very powerful structure that was not in the local space (our limited perspective) to start with. This is a topos—a blending of every point of view. As developed by Alexander Grothendieck, topos theory uncovers the variable logics of these spaces of integration produced by sheaves: beyond binaries and polarities, a space of multi-logics built on the mutual inclusion (and not the exclusion) of opposites and the utilisation of relative universals—truths that hold only within certain logics, applied to certain parts of the world. Topoi provide an integration, a point of view beyond the atomization of our world. In their blending of perspectives, they provide a rich metaphor for how we can move beyond the imposition of difference and diversity. As the radical Transfeminist writing of Mijke van der Drift indicates, every new logic creates a new topos and so starts to generate points of view. Topoi establish metaphors for the fight against the monological, and the need for the plurilogical to be enacted in our lives. Beyond the types that are constantly given to us, beyond our diversity, beyond any monological order, there are interesting and beautiful archetypes and a pluriverse of logics. Instead of insisting on resolutions into binary oppositions, we can practise a back and forth, a folding and unfolding that allows us to focus on transits, transformations and a trans-ontology so that the dynamics of the world—structures well beyond what we can experience from our local perspectives—can be included in our thought. Beyond elasticity, plasticity; beyond fixed universals and absolute truths, relative universals and relative truths; instead of objects, quasi-objects and a kind of plastic thinking and being.
In terms of screens and the capture of visuality: I don’t know. When we were speaking with Ailton Krenak the other day, he mentioned emerging technology (perhaps in China) where to purchase a product, you don’t use any equipment—there is no apparatus you hold or object you swipe; you simply show your face. He referred to this as "a terrible metaphor for the end of the world," perhaps echoing how Davi Kopenawa talks about a society obsessed with merchandise. In this case, merchandise, money, the body, and the image have completely collapsed into one thing.
At the same time, I often think about the famous Audre Lorde quote about how we cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Of course, I agree in many ways, but I also consider how that statement is based on a notion of property—who decides what the master's tools are? Did they build them? I think Buenaventura Durruti argued that the working class built our cities (the master's house) and could build others. So, I don’t know. I think contemporary visuality is a compromised set of technologies, but we must think about how we use those technologies to our ends—which, as Ailton says, will not collapse the visuality of our faces with money itself, but maybe could serve other desires. I’m not sure.
fig.4
It is a joyful challenge to commit to the synchronic labor of, in the words of da Silva, listening to ancestral claims, where "past" and "history" are simply different stages, transmutations, and cosmological interconnections of the present. In what way does Arika's episodicity aim to create a legacy across times and spaces?
We were interviewing Ailton Krenak the other day, and he spoke about this. He discusses the notion of pluriverses and how it is built on the possibility that other worlds are already here, even before we realize the end of this one that persists. He suggests that this dominant, colonial world is built on certain pillars and beliefs, one of which is the imposition of linear time. Instead of a beginning, middle, and end, Ailton talked about understanding that things have a beginning, a middle, and another beginning. And that understanding this can be a poetic gesture, a way to "extinguish this world" (based on linearity, or what Denise, in the essay you cite, would call sequentiality). I am not suggesting that Arika tries to appropriate such indigenous forms of knowledge, but I think they can help us begin to unlearn our own ways of knowing, to start desiring something else, or to desire to be something else—or, indeed, not to desire to be (in the Western sense) at all.
We decided to call these events Episodes back in 2012. The idea was to find a word that we could imbue with our meaning. We take "Episodes" to mean doing things that are episodic and iterative: a process of deepening, with regular collaborators and friends. They have a narrative, but it is not a linear one. It cycles back, goes off on tangents, and starts again. I’m not sure if that creates a legacy, as you say in your question. It’s more that they might be part of an integrative deepening of ways of knowing and doing.
Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It will take place 13 – 17 November 2024 Venues: Tramway, Glasgow / Live Stream Glasgow / School of Art, Glasgow
//
Barry Esson is co-director and founding member of Arika, a Scotland-based political arts organization concerned with supporting connections between artistic production and social change. Arika produces Episodes, an iterative program of multiformat public events that has addressed abolitionist politics, conceptual mathematics, disability justice, and the Black Radical Tradition, among other themes.
- Image Credits
Cover: Denise Ferreria da Silva, Still from Serpent Rain, 2016, by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva
fig.1: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Oriana. Photo by Bleue Liverpool from Oriana by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
fig.2: Karrabing Film Collective, Image from Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2019, Karrabing Film Collective
fig.3: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Oriana. Film still from Photo by Sara Griffith from Oriana by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
fig.4: Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri. Image courtesy Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri
