Dis/Entangling Perspectives in Material Research

Neither person, nor thing, but mediating awkwardly between these categories, human hair leads unexpected lives. Disconnected from multiple bodies around the world it sets out on long and convoluted journeys, transiting and transformed in factories and workshops in India, China and Myanmar before being dispersed to every continent. Here it finds alternative resting places on new heads and becomes interwoven into personal stories of self-enhancement which combine concerns with aesthetics, religion, health, wealth and heritage. Intimate at the points of disconnection and reattachment, yet alienated in between where it is treated as mere fiber, it forms part of a billion-dollar global industry for wigs and extensions that feeds on disparities of income, culture, aspiration and belief. This lecture focuses on the awkwardness of this human crop and on the techniques used in the trade to mask the actual human origins of hair whilst at the same time emphasizing its abstract human qualities. Focussing on commercial frictions, racial fictions and uncomfortably connected religious practices, it tracks some of the largely hidden entanglements and disconnections that make up this global trade in human fiber.

Emma Tarlo is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work combines anthropology, life writing and curation. Much of her research focuses on intimate forms of material culture caught up in complex transcultural human stories. Her books include Clothing Matters (winner of the Coomaraswamy Prize 1998), Unsettling Memories (2003) and Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (2010). Over the last ten years, she has conducted extensive visual, ethnographic and practice-based research on hair and continues to be entangled with this topic in spite of herself! Her book, Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair was an experiment in anthropological non-fiction and was awarded the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing in 2017. Emma is currently working with co-curator Sarah Byrne on an exhibition entitled Hair: Untold Stories due to open at the Horniman Museum in London in December 2021.

Reflecting on the process of decolonial and feminist knowledge production, I bring forward examples of the difficulty of conducting research within institutions that are driven by extraction. I discuss my own queer femme and decolonial epistemes in relation to sites of artistic, activist, and scholarly production including extractive zones, sea edges, and sites of collective trauma.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar. She is the author of three books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and activisms in troubled times. She is also the author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press). Macarena is the Founding Director of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute, www.globalsouthcenter.org.

The desire to control rain is not new, and it is not unique to the People’s Republic of China. To tell the story of the Sky River—both the conceptual model and the weather modification project—is also to learn the hydro-geographical history of China, which has actively manipulated its relationship to water for thousands of years, and has been developing weather modification technologies since the 1950s. One of these technologies is the cloud seeding stove, a rudimentary metallic envelope on a short pedestal that encases a high-performance combustion chamber, employing military rocket engine technology to burn a chemical compound of silver and potassium iodide. The stoves are installed on elevated terrain and strategically positioned at high altitudes where upward winds deliver the chemical exhaust into cloud formations above to trigger rain. A discrete object built and replicated across China, the stove is where and how the physical embodiment of the Sky River—as both phenomenon and project—is seen for the first time.

Elise Misao Hunchuck (b. tkaronto/Toronto) is a landscape researcher, editor, and educator trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography (University of Toronto, CA). Based in Berlin and Milan, her research uses cartographic, photographic, and text-based practices to document political ecologies, exploring material landscapes and relationships between resources, infrastructures, natural processes, human and other-than-human existences. She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture, a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, and a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat. She is also the editorial curator for transmediale.

Marco Ferrari is the co-founder of Studio Folder, a design practice based in Milan, working both on commissions in the fields of culture and the arts and on research projects examining the politics and visualization of spatial data. He is the co-author of A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, and a visiting professor at Columbia GSAPP in New York and the Royal College of Art, London, where he co-leads the architectural design studio ADS7.

The decades around 1900 are known for the constitution and expansion of the humanities—literally, the sciences of the mind (Geisteswissenschaften) in German-speaking countries. The same period was characterized by the sheer unlimited supply of natural resources: wood, cotton, wax, shellac, camphor, and iron formed the material basis of paper, phonograms, and film, facilitating the extensive use of these media during the modern period. This lecture focuses on exemplary media used by humanities scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and traces their global, often colonial, provenance, supply chains, and manufacturing processes. In three short presentations, we will shed light on the far-reaching ecological, economic, and political dimensions inherent to the large-scale production and circulation of knowledge in humanities disciplines.

Viktoria Tkaczyk is a professor of media and knowledge techniques at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She has published widely on the history of aviation, architecture, acoustics, the neurosciences, experimental aesthetics, and media use in the sciences and humanities more generally. Among her most recent publications are the special issue of Sound Studies entitled “Sonic Things: Knowledge Formation in Flux,” Sound Studies 6, 2020 (co-edited with L. van der Miesen) and Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (coedited with A. Hui and M. Mills, OUP 2020). Currently, she is completing a book entitled Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and preparing a new project on the history of the applied sciences and humanities.

Lotte Schüßler is a research associate at the Institute of Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her doctoral studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2020. Her thesis Theaterausstellungen. Spielräume der Geisteswissenschaften um 1900 (Theater Exhibitions: Playgrounds of the Humanities around 1900) will be published by Wallstein Verlag in 2022. At present, she is working on a project about the use and reuse of paper in the history of the humanities. Schüßler also regularly teaches theater and media history at Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität.

Jonathan Haid is a doctoral student in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His dissertation focuses on nitrocellulose and its raw materials in the context of nineteenth and twentieth-century humanities. He obtained his master’s degree in cultural history and theory from Humboldt Universität. From 2016 to 2019, he worked as a student assistant at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

This lecture engages with the relation between humans, snow and technology in the alpine cryosphere. Against the background of the deep changes going on in this environment due to global tourism and climate change, I focus on technologies of managing snow and glaciers, which are both rapidly shrinking and vanishing as an effect of climate change. Based on my anthropological fieldwork on the Pitztal glacier ski resort in the Tyrol in Austria I primarily discuss a unique technology for making so-called all-weather snow in order to investigate its claim to be independent of the insecure weather and atmosphere. It is argued that through a multi-disciplinary approach we can gain new insights into past, current and future dynamics of the political ecology of snow and ice on local and global scales.
In accordance with theories and methods associated with (environmental) anthropology, new materiality studies and the history of technology, I first present the paths of the emergence, spread and application of this special technique in highly diverse and challenging envi¬ronments that are taking course in horizontal, vertical and transnational directions. Second, I illustrate the problems this technology is facing in the alpine cryosphere. In particular, I show how glacier water is appearing as a powerful force and agent impeding humans’ plans to make all-weather snow.

Herta Nöbauer is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, where she received her doctoral degree in 2009. She is a social and cultural anthropologist and her current research is on the anthropology of snow and vertical globalization in the European Alps, with a focus on human–environment–technology relations, weather issues and climate change, identity and work issues related to the environment. Her further research and teaching interests include various topics associated with the anthropology of technology, the anthropology of emotions, and masculinity studies.

In the history of human civilization, never has a substance been rendered so amorphous unlike sand. Comparable to salt and latterly fossil fuels, sand remains deeply embedded – of not ingrained – in everyday life, as resource and as metaphor that is as sacred as it is banal. This presentation contemplates the everyday politics and poetics of sand, as remembered, embodied and contested in contemporary times. I draw inspiration from the island city-state of Singapore, recognized for its own thwarted relationship with flows of sand (some illicit), often resourced from the archipelagic region for its extensive land reclamation activity. Drawing on coastal anthropology and political ecology, the seminar traces how sand is enlivened not only for projects on utopic placemaking, but in remaking urban coastal futures. Enlisted not only as a commodity in geo-engineered terraforming and state-building, I consider how sand – as substance and symbol – exists in the interstices of urban aspirational identity-making and in inter-generational memory. To this end, I consider an ›artificial‹ beach on Singapore’s Lazarus Island, a space of in-betweenness that offers to be read against the grain of what constitutes as mainland and ›outer‹ periphery. The presentation also draws attention to mobile, practice-led research on locating and tracing oral histories and trans-local ›sand stories,‹ particularly in a geopolitical space that mutes the silent work of sand, relegating it at times to a shadowy existence.

Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa is an environmental anthropologist and cultural geographer based the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research. Her work draws on multisensory, more-than-human and decolonial perspectives in studying diverse histories and cultural politics of seacoasts in the Indo-Malay archipelago and the east Caribbean.

Engaging with the multi-layered legal ethnographic setting of Guatemalan Maya Q’eqchi’ communities, genocide survivors and now facing water extractivism, in this lecture I will discuss why the dominant legal framework should not take for granted what human-water-life means. Despite the fact that human rights are a place for discussing inequalities among different groups, when it comes to the recognition of different ontologies, this becomes a place of political and legal struggle. I argue that legal scholars should take seriously the possibilities of the existence of different realities, where the relations with water and life include acknowledging more-than-humans too. In fact, in the legal sphere the introduction of the plurivers of worlds is urgent to discuss our relationships with the natural environment. A critical engagement with plurilegal water ontologies opens up a space for a much needed reconceptualizing human rights beyond its anthropocentric dogma, specifically, those regarding relations to and with water and life.

Lieselotte Viaene has a professional career marked by interdisciplinary academic and applied research in legal anthropology, legal pluralism, indigenous peoples’ rights, transitional justice, decolonization of human rights and extractivism. Lieselotte, Belgian-Flemish, is a legal anthropologist with a master's degree in criminology and a PhD in law. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC project RIVERS - Water/human rights beyond the human? Indigenous water ontologies, plurilegal encounters and interlegal translation (2019-2024) and Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. Previously, she was an individual post-doc Marie Curie fellow (2016-2018) with the GROUNDHR project at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (Portugal). For almost twenty years she has been collaborating with indigenous peoples in Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia in various spaces: communities that have survived the genocide, national organizations and organizations of indigenous lawyers. As a human rights practitioner, Lieselotte worked, among others, in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Ecuador (2010-2013), where she was responsible for the areas of collective rights of indigenous and afro-descendant peoples and transitional justice.

In our talk, we expand on the research behind our new film Constant (2022), which came out of our question: what happened when measurement standards shifted away from the human body as the measure of all things and became a science unto itself: metrology. We explore three moments in the history of measurement standardization: Early Modern land surveying, the Metric Revolution, and contemporary Big Science. Each of these periods reconfigured measurement standards through shifts in conceptions of materiality: from land and body to the planetary, to the physical constitution of matter. In each of these configurations, measurement mediates concepts of egalitarianism, justice, and the ever-shifting threshold between the human body and the world. In the talk, we will address these themes through the prism of the film and the processes that led to its production.

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner are artists, filmmakers, researchers and writers. They’ve been working collaboratively in moving image, text, and lectures since 2017. Focussing on moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds, their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world. Their combined and individual work has been presented globally: Berlinale, Rotterdam, Courtisane, Cinema Du Reel, RIDM, Ann Arbor, Alchemy and Guanajuato film festivals, Eye Film Museum, HKW Berlin, ICA London, CAC Vilnius, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Berlinische Galerie, MUMOK Vienna, Sonic Acts, Impakt Festival, Berlin Atonal and the Videobrasil, Moscow Young Art, Wroclaw Media Art, Venice Art and Venice Architecture biennales. Together they have co-authored a number of essays and the book All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press, 2021). Sasha holds a PhD from Goldsmiths and is a lecturer in film at Queen Mary University of London. Beny is a PhD candidate in Archaeology of Media and Technology at Winchester School of Art, and has lectured at a number of art academies internationally.

To understand our precarious agro-industrial present, it is vital to see how the visual cultures of agriculture have shaped what we know and feel about our agrarian and natural environments. I use the concept of the ‘expanded landscape’ to explore how landscape is an iteration of the natural world inclusive of soil and air and also a capacious, multi-disciplinary, and trans-geographic terrain. Drawing on histories of art, agriculture, energy, and media, I examine both state-led projects as well as cultures of protest, artist-led activism and collective action in modern and contemporary India.

Sria Chatterjee is an art historian and environmental humanities scholar. She is the incoming Head of Research and Learning at The Paul Mellon Centre, London, UK. Previously, she was a researcher at the Academy of Art and Design, FHNW in Basel and Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. She holds a PhD from Princeton University (2019) and is currently working on two book projects. Sria works at the intersection of art, science and environment with a focus on questions around racial and environmental justice. She founded and currently leads the online project Visualizing the Virus – https://visualizingthevirus.com/ and is contributing editor at British Art Studies.

Abstract: In the late 1990s, using newly developed X-ray transmission technology, De Beers launched the first fully ›hands free‹ diamond sorting facility at Jwaneng diamond mine in Botswana. This was the culmination of a more than century-long desire to remove human labor from the diamond sorting process. The human body - the hand, brain, eye trifecta in particular - is an excellent sorting machine. However, because of the close proximity between laborers and gem, sorting was always considered the riskiest stage in the diamond commodity chain. Mines were particularly concerned about the swallowing of diamonds, which transformed the Native body from an ideal laboring machine into a potential vessel for smuggling. Long before the application of X-ray technology to sorting, as far back as the early 1900s, De Beers used X-ray technology to scan laborers' insides for swallowed gems. Taking these two technologies as examples, in this talk I will trace how the X-ray’s ability to simultaneously make diamonds hypervisible and Native bodies transparent, meant the rays became the cornerstone of diamond mining security. By arguing that racialized ideas of the excessively capacious Native body informed not only more traditional surveillance technologies but also the seemingly benign automation of sorting, I will suggest that these technologies give us occasion to think about the relationship between visibility, technology and race anew.

Zandi Sherman is a PhD student in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She has a Master's degree in Global Studies, jointly awarded by the Universities of Cape Town and Freiburg. Her research focuses on public and extractive infrastructures, which she uses as objects through which to consider the production and endurance of race in South Africa. Her dissertation project examines the infrastructural management of human bodies and commodities in the diamond mines of Kimberley, South Africa.

In a women’s prison camp, where access to commodities is limited, the means to make daily life are improvised. Zip-locking tuna pouches hold cosmetics, beads, lotion, medicine. 32 oz. juice bottles are assiduously recycled, making their way through fugitive networks of favors and trade from kitchen to cell block. Every can with a lid, every bag without holes, every cardboard box becomes a container of value. And containers, as the psychoanalysts teach us, are critical. What can pockets of limited commodity improvisation (romanticized in this example) teach about human-thing relations?

A settler-scavenger who scuttles between the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples (»Minneapolis«) and the Lenape (Lenapehoking, or, New York City), Eli Nadeau studies plastic, colonialism, and psychoanalysis, and teaches at Parsons the New School for Design. They want to talk about books with you. And abolish the police.

Data analysis and digital visualization methods are considered crucial tools for making a difference in today's society. Yet, we find a growing number of examples where citizen scientists, environmental activists, or forensics amateurs use decidedly analog methods for investigating and presenting evidence of pollution, climate change, or disinformation. Their practices emphasize the process of data generation and turn it into a sensory-aesthetic inquiry with profound social and political implications. In the context of such post-digital practices of visualization and evidence construction, I will discuss the idea of autography as a perspective on data generation that attends to processes of self-inscription based on the premise that data are material entities rather than abstract representations.

Dietmar Offenhuber is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy, where he leads the graduate program in Information Design and Visualization. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, and a Dipl. Ing. in Architecture from the Technical University Vienna. He worked as a Key Researcher at the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the Ars Electronica Futurelab and professor in the Interface Culture program of the Art University Linz, Austria. He is currently visiting scholar at Harvard Metalab and a fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities. His research focuses on the relationship between design, mediated environments, and governance. He wrote the award-winning monograph »Waste is Information – Infrastructure Legibility and Governance« (MIT Press), worked as an advisor to the United Nations and published books on Urban Data, Accountability Technologies and Urban Informatics. His PhD dissertation received the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2014 from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, his research received the Best Paper Award 2012 from the Journal of the American Planning Association and the ASCINA young PI award. In his artistic practice, he focuses on auditory space, collaborating with composers Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl under the name »stadtmusik«. his work has been exhibited internationally in venues including the Centre Pompidou, Sundance and the Hong Kong International Film Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, Secession Vienna, and the Seoul International Media Art Biennale. His awards include the first prize in the NSF Visualization Challenge, the Jury Award at the Melbourne International Animation Festival, the Art Directors Club Silver Award, a Special Mention at the 12th International Media Art Biennale, and Honorary Mentions from File Festival São Paulo, Ars Electronica and Transmediale, Berlin.

Coal has been identified as the single biggest contributor to climate change. Yet, despite its devastating effect on the environment, many states still consider it a compelling component of their national identity. Poland and Australia are among these coal nations. In my presentation, I will examine the historical development of coal imagery and its dissemination through industrial exhibitions and trade fairs to unearth the relationship between natural resources, industrial products and national identity. I ask: what is a state without coal? What happens when a major component of national identity gets devalued and discredited over time? By posing these questions, the project intends not only to challenge the relevance of persevering coal imagery and problematize the use of coal to represent states’ agenda but also to interrogate the designed and seemingly fixed nature of national identities.

Kasia Jeżowska is a historian of design and culture. She works as a lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she co-authored a comprehensive history and theory of design program. She was awarded a doctorate in History from the University of Oxford in 2019 for a dissertation on the industrial exhibitions and trade fairs in the post-war period, which she currently turns into a monograph, tentatively titled »Socialist by design. Statecraft, industry, and the national style in Cold War Poland«. This talk is a part of her new project, which continues an investigation into the political potential of industrial exhibitions, placing coal at the forefront of this inquiry.

FRAUD will discuss the EURO⁠—VISION project; an art-led inquiry into the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies, which focuses on the inscriptive operations of resource management. Initiated in 2018 in collaboration with Btihaj Ajana as an investigation into the collusion between border securitization and extraction, the project examines the many entangled modes of extraction that Europe enacts on "third countries" with its Critical Raw Materials Initiative. The initiative brings into focus the covalence among international relations, trade, economic policy and border security. FRAUD will introduce some of the strands of research which have stemmed from resource categories such as phosphate, fish(eries), sand and carbon. Challenging what is now considered a critical material with such categories helps to elucidate how these are managed as resources to be extracted, as well as how their plunder is mobilized and institutionalized. More importantly, this framework aims to enable looking beyond these practices to the possibility of thinking and doing otherwise.

FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) is a London-based duo which develops modes of art-led inquiry that examine financialization through extractive practices and cultivate critical cosmogony building. Audrey (b. Canada) leads the Digital Arts Computing program and is a Critical Studies Lecturer in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Francisco (b. Spain) is an architect who currently teaches on the MArch Spatial Practices at Central Saint Martins, and Digital Humanities at King's College London. He was awarded the Wellcome Trust People Awards (2016) and authored ‘Talking Dirty’ (2016). Somerset House Studio alumni, the duo has been awarded the State of Lower Saxony – HBK Braunschweig Fellowship (2020), the King’s College Cultural Institute Grant (2018), and has been commissioned by the Contemporary Art Archipelago (2021), the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020), and the Cockayne Foundation (2018). FRAUD’s work has been presented at the Salon Suisse (the 57th Venice Biennale), the Whitechapel Gallery, Kunsthall Trondheim, Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Asia Culture Center (ACC), and has been featured in ‘Behind the Smart World’, Radio Canada, and Asia Art Pacific. The duo’s work is part of the permanent collections of the European Investment Bank Institute (LU) and the Art and Nature Center – Beulas Foundation (SP).