Dis/Entangling Material Futures

Michaela Büsse works as Research Associate at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory and Associated Investigator at the excellence cluster »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material«, both at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is interested in the interplay of material practices, technologies, and geological processes. Currently, Michaela analyses land reclamation projects in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands and develops a performative reading of design based on sand’s granular physics.

When trying to understand how sand became one of the most important resources in the Netherlands, we ought to consider the centuries-long history of land reclamation in the country. The lecture-performance will feature sequences from Michaela’s new film to address how the specific context in the Netherlands led to the establishment of land reclamation and the resourcification of sand. What started as a means to keep the status quo and protect the country from floods, became an expertise and an export product through the industry’s growing professionalization and the development of simulation techniques.

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 on the diamond mines of Kimberley, South Africa

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 labourer 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.

Sandra Jasper is a Junior Professor for the Geography of Gender in Human-Environment-Systems at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests are in urban nature, soundscapes, and feminist theory. She is co-editor (with Matthew Gandy) of »The Botanical City« (jovis, 2020) and co-author and co-producer of the documentary film »Natura Urbana. The Brachen of Berlin« (UK/Germany, 2017, 72’). She is currently completing a monograph on the experimental spaces of West Berlin for which she received a Graham Foundation grant. Her new collaborative research project »Re-Scaling Global Health. Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet« (2022-2024), which is funded by the Berlin University Alliance Grand Challenge Initiative on Global Health, explores human-animal-environment relationships and the multiple links between planetary health, biodiversity, and environmental pollution in cities across the globe.

In Berlin and many other cities, wastelands are a defining feature of the urban landscape. Wastelands might appear useless at first glance, but they constitute the material grounds for building an alternative city. Wastelands open up new questions about the past, present and future of more-than-human cities. They are repurposed by nonhuman life and provide refuge in the midst of densely built-up environments. As hospitable stopovers for migratory species on their journeys across borders and continents, wastelands inspire new ideas of belonging beyond ideologically charged notions of ›native‹ nature. Also within cities and urban regions, these abandoned zones form part of ›green corridors‹ for animals that move across increasingly sealed and fragmented habitats. In their state of abandonment, these unusual zones are experimental fields for studying the adaptability of nonhuman life and speculating about future ecologies in future cities. At present, however, the future of wasteland spaces and their unique ecologies is uncertain. Many remaining wasteland sites are currently being lost at a rapid pace to speculative forms of urban development.

In this talk, I will trace the histories, contemporary forms and prospective futures of wasteland spaces in Berlin. Unlike a utilitarian or financial speculative perspective that renders ostensibly empty sites ahistorical and devoid of human and nonhuman life, this talk recovers a range of artistic, activist and scientific responses that valorize wastelands as lived and inhabited spaces. I argue that wastelands are vital cultural and ecological zones that have sparked a counter-aesthetic of urban space and concomitant political efforts to protect these sites as public spaces, often against corporate and municipal interests. Thus, urban wastelands are speculative not merely in a financial sense. These abandoned zones are future-oriented in the myriad possibilities of public life that they promise.

Heather Davis is a writer, researcher and teacher whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is an assistant professor of culture and media at The New School. Her most recent book, »Plastic Matter« (Duke University Press, 2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is also a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Thinking through questions of inheritance, intimacy, and queer ecologies, I introduce the concept of plastic matter. Building on the work of scholars in feminist new materialism, petrocultures, and science and technology studies, I use the concept of plastic matter to describe the philosophical assumptions that fostered the conditions for plastic to emerge in the world in the first place. This concept speaks to how the materiality of plastic has been transferred to our expectations of matter more broadly, how matter itself has come to be produced as inherently pliable, disposable, and consumable. I argue that it is important to become more intimate with the objects we abjure, more curious about plastic, not to eschew the very real damage it is doing, but as an invitation to become more accountable.

Sria Chatterjee is an art historian and environmental humanities scholar. She is the 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.

Thinking critically about the future of the ground we stand on and the air we breathe requires a deep dive into the cultural histories of soil and air. This talk explores how soil and air have been represented and used as a medium of representation by a range of different actors for very different agendas across the twentieth century. Using examples from India, Britain, and elsewhere, it probes the concept of what I call the ›expanded landscape‹: the fused complex of the terrestrial and aerial, as physical and somatic spaces that are mutually dependent and, as I argue, deeply political.

Astrida Neimanis is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at the UBC Okanagan on unceded Syilx territories in BC, Canada, where they are also Director of The FEELed Lab. Astrida is the author of »Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology« and co-editor of »Thinking with Water and Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive«. Their current collaborative projects include COMPOSTING feminisms, the Weathering Collective, and Learning Endings.

Angsty about feeling always like a bad researcher, I have been trying to figure out what I do and how I do it, as a writer and cultural theorist in feminist environmental humanities. I have arrived at something I am calling »feeled work.« Feeled work is way of doing research that is practice-based, multimodal, multiscalar, sensory, embodied, worldly, often collaborative, often experimental. Drawing on anthropological, natural scientific, and other disciplinary versions of »fieldwork,« feeled work foregrounds observation, description, learning and researching in situ. In conducting research, the field of feeled work is democratic and capacious. In analysing data and »writing up,« feeled work is less concerned with »is this true?« and entirely committed to »is this honest?« Feeled work insists on implication. Feeled work is open-eyed/eared/nosed/bodied. Feeled work is fueled by desire. Feeled work's objective is feeling, and feeling back.

Savannah Cox is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning. Her work focuses on urban climate adaptation and climate risk governance and has been published in The Geographical Journal, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Economy and Society, among others

How are »invisible« climate risks and looming climate impacts, and government action on them, made visible to local constituencies? What sorts of political projects and infrastructural interventions might these exercises in visibility enable and foreclose? This lecture considers these questions through the case of the »Miami Forever Climate Ready Strategy«, an ongoing, comprehensive climate planning initiative in Miami, Florida. Government officials there suggest that a key feature and innovation of the strategy is its multi-pronged emphasis on transparency: making near- and medium-term climate risks and climate action vis-à-vis emissions reductions and adaptive infrastructure investment quantifiable, communicable, and visible in the everyday lives of residents through virtual public fora and design techniques. I show how transparency functions on the one hand as a strategic configuration of speech, silence, and metrics on climate risk that reinforces what some government officials call a pro-development and »free market model« of climate preparedness. On the other hand, I discuss how the strategy has helped create novel political constituencies around climate metrology. Specifically, I explore how residents have enrolled the multiple possible ways to measure carbon, and carbon emissions reductions, in their wider efforts to critique the city’s climate action efforts and advance alternative climate futures. Taken together, this case allows us to conceptualize climate transparency not simply as the latest instance of »measurementality,« but as an abstract political technology whose outcomes are open-ended.

Karen Pinkus is Professor at Cornell University. Trained in early modern studies, she is known for her scholarship on Italian literature, film and visual arts. More than a decade ago she emerged as one of the first humanists to address climate change. She has lectured widely on topics ranging from decarbonization conceived through literature to speculative post-fossil futures. Her forthcoming book »Subsurface« is conceived as a follow-up to her imaginative 2016 book »Fuel. A Speculative Dictionary.«

What happens when we think about fuels as matters in various states as distinct from combustion machines, energy infrastructures, petrostates, global economic supports and even end users? Such an exercise is interesting on its own merits, but to what degree might it be useful for human relations with fossil fuels, with renewables, but also the matters that are extracted to serve our power? What happens if we grant agency, voice or spirituality to certain fuels? The talk, focused on three case studies of »future fuels« recently in the news will move between speculative design, science fiction and narrative theory.

Susan Schuppli is an artist-researcher based in the UK whose work has explored the ways in which non-human witnesses, such as materials and objects, enter into public discourse and testify to historical events, especially those involving political violence, ethnic conflict, and war crimes. This research resulted in the monograph »Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence«, published by MIT Press in 2020 as well as various artworks. Her current research and artistic production expands these investigations to examine how environmental systems and the transformations brought about by global warming are also generating new forms of evidence; creating, in effect, a planetary archive of material witnesses. Much of this work has been developed through the multi-year »Learning from Ice Project« which reflects upon the ways in which the different knowledge practices mediated by ice as well as the differential experiences of cold are entangled with legal questions, human rights violations but also claims for social and environmental justice. Schuppli's artistic work has been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US. She is a recipient of a COP26 Creative Commission »Listening to Ice« sponsored by the British Council, which involves scientific and community-based work at Drang Drung Glacier in Ladakh, India. She is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths University, London and is an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture.

This talk investigates the politics of cold, exploring the ways in which knowledge practices from ice core science and glaciology to intergenerational wisdom and local observations, climate activism to environmental policy and law engage with the situated material conditions of ice.

Dimitrij Mlekuž Vrhovnik is an associate professor and researcher associated with the University of Ljubljana and the Institute for the protection of the cultural heritage of Slovenia. His work explores the archaeological – thus material and historically specific – aspects of interactions between humans and non-non humans, especially human-animal relations, the materiality of everyday life, the role of mobilities in the construction of places and landscapes and the social uses of technology. His work often employs the creative use of technology, especially geo-computing and remote sensing.

Milk is not an inert substance that can be studied in isolation, shaped by determinist, causal schemes, but rather something vital and imbued with its own agency, part of as a messy encounter, a knot, an assemblage that connects animals, humans, hormones, enzymes, bacteria, food, genes, technologies and material culture. The matter has generative power, agency, which becomes actualized in distribution across assemblages. Assemblages are hybrid formations, unruly tangles of heterogeneous things, comprised of both human and non-human things, and they may also include the things we associate with ›nature‹ (like grass, microbes, organs, animals) and ›culture‹ (like language, material culture, technologies, practices). And the matter also has its own history. The biological aspects of human milk consumption and its evolutionary history are clearly enmeshed with cultural practices and preferences. However, milk as a food for adult humans is a relatively recent phenomenon. Organic residues preserved in pottery vessels provide direct evidence that people in the Neolithic, from the Near East, North Africa, to Denmark and the British Isles, started to drink milk. New evidence pushes the beginning of the consumption of animal milk back to the seventh millennium BC and links it with the domestication of animals and the introduction of pottery technology. Milk is a foodstuff, food, but first of all, a matter.

There are numerous forms of resistance to the process of obtaining milk from animals. Milk cannot be simply extracted from animals, perhaps by force; it requires co-dependency. Getting milk from animals enacts practices, bodily routines, material culture, and knowledge. Milk, as a food, provides its own material resistance to consumption by adult humans. For lactose-intolerant adults – and before 5500 BC, this included _all_ people – drinking fresh milk resulted in explosive diarrhea. Thus, in order to be digestible, new materialities have to enter the assemblage. Enter microbial cultures that ferment the milk and digest lactose. Microbes not only contribute a kind of labor to the production of yogurt or cheese but also confer a certain vitality on them. However, to recruit microbial cultures, we need specific technology and material culture: containers that mix and store substances and keep an assemblage together, strainers separate the assemblage into solids (curd) and liquids (whey) that contain lactose. Technologies are not just mediators, interfaces between us and the world; technologies are external organs, full partners in our assemblages with the world. This long and complex history of interactions and interventions resulted in realizing some potential in cows, humans and other creatures while denying others.

Stefanie Fishel is a lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, a visiting fellow and member of the Environment and Governance Research Group at UNSW, Canberra, and a Fellow of the Earth System Governance Project. Current publications include »From the Human Environment to the Posthuman Earth: Troubling the Nature/Culture Divide in Environmental Justice« (with Anthony Burke) in Anthropocene Securities: Recollections and Reflections 50 Years After the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. She edited and contributed to a critical exchange entitled »Politics in the Time of COVIDq in Contemporary Political Theory and has a forthcoming chapter in The Long Year, a University of Minnesota Press book, where she reflects on the COVID pandemic’s troubled relationship with freedom. Her book, The Microbial State: The Body Politic and Global Thriving, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2017.

Humans live on a complex and magical planet. We are entangled in multiple ecologies, many of which we are unaware of because we do not have the perceptual ability to see or experience them. This has been exemplified in the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. Humanity has struggled with this invisible actor, one that does not act in ways that we can humanize; it can only be understood in the terms of social and political worlds that the virus interacts with while actively moving, mutating, and infecting hosts. Most have fetishized a return to ›normal‹ while ignoring the material realities of the pandemic. From our human perspective, SARS-CoV2’s appearance as a global actor has exposed the dangers of pushing multiple earth systems to the verge of collapse through human terraforming, unsustainable agricultural processes, urbanization, deforestation, and resource extraction. Disasters, natural and otherwise, are always embedded in a larger story where human injustice and inequity play starring roles. But can this human experience also be viewed differently? How might we recast the human experience to consider not just the pathogenic consequences of COVID-19 but its clues to how we can live otherwise on a complex and interdependent planet? I will imagine a pluriverse, or a world which allows for multiple visions and ways of being alongside with the most abundant biological entities on the earth: viruses. I will argue that rather than attempting to ›humanize‹ the virus to return to life as normal, attention should be paid to how we might ›viralize‹ the human instead. After all, isn’t ›normal‹ what brought us to place of extreme weather events, pandemics, rising waters, species death, and resource fuelled climate wars? What can the microbial teach us about our shared futures?