Residual Encounters: intra-placemaking in Opening to the Other.
A reflection on the long-term collaborative postal exchange between the artists Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir and Rhona Eve Clews. India Boxall.
Water is a conduit and a mode of connection.
- Astrida Neimanis
Rhona Eve Clews Photographing a Geyser. Image credit Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir 2020.
I am wading into a reflection on Opening to the Other after experiencing the artists present their collaboration at the recent Arts Territory Exchange symposium “Iceland: Mobility, Spatiality, Virtuality”. The event held space for artists and creative researchers to share how their creative practices have been informed by Iceland's geologic, ecologic, and symbolic resonance. Despite their distance, Iceland provides a multitude of ways into site specificity for these practitioners. I recall my own desire to travel to Iceland upon seeing the apparent closeness of its silvery mass to my home in Scotland on Google maps. Travel restrictions in pandemic-realism nullified this desire, but I can visit Iceland via the fibre optic cables pulsing on the floor of the North Sea. My awareness of the thick waters churning the distance between us has become palpable. I travel to Iceland in my head and online and via the symposium and my body stays here: I become a wave.
Berglind was born in Iceland and Rhona dreamt of Iceland as a teenager living in an English suburban town not so far from where I grew up. Though the sea wasn’t far away, the proximity to the City and engine of London beckoned. For me, this proximity germinated a longing for a denser and more engulfing sensation of the sea and its accompanying weather
(problematising London comes easily when dreaming of Reykjavik).
Berglind and Rhona began their epistolary exchange in 2018, reaching to each other across land mass and gaping sea to collaborate on material encounters. Anchored to Iceland as a vital source for generating new material knowledges, Opening to the Other holds space for both artists to contemplate their prerequisite ties to the country. Berglind and Rhona both have practices with roots in photographic and performance-based processes, employing analogue techniques that speak to residual encounters between mediums. In 2020, as lockdown engulfed Europe, the artists were well-equipped to respond to long distance contact, collaboration, and friendship. In the unprecedented light of pandemic-realism, Opening to the Other became a practice in mapping-in-response-and-in-relation-to precarious and uncertain conditions.
What is true of the map is true of the device it resides on, as it is of the broader category of networked technologies to which both belong [...] equipped with (these) devices, we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time, joined to everything at once yet never fully anywhere at all.
- Adam Greenfield
The body pinned to the virtual map is chartered in real-time. In this inexplicable enmeshing of the subject of human body with an objectified, or codified, notion of place, the binary dictating the two comes apart. What is revealed? It depends on whose bodies are mapping or being mapped. Mapped through surveillance, all bodies are chartered and divided; but it is the marginalised and/or female-identifying body that is dense mapped with cultural and political marks, predominantly by colonial and patriarchal supremacies in the system of neoliberal capitalism.
Image credit Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir 2020.
The virtual realm deals with bodies via algorithmic pathways and structures of code that allude to a technocracy hinged to the same supremacies/systems. In light of climate-chaos-pandemic-realism, we have witnessed certain bodies being disproportionately affected, due to a myriad of oppressions and traumas, such as climate migrancy and the global monopoly on Covid-19 vaccination. In this epoch, the interbeing of self and place is more prevalent than ever, yet our technopolitical systems do not seem to have caught up to the fact. As I type, a microscopic virus is moving across the borders of skin and land at an alarming rate, revealing that the intersections between these actors have yet to be reckoned with.
According to geographer Doreen Massey, a map is “a presentation of an essential structure” - the human body, the body of the Earth, the bodies of water that frame continents, are essential and contingent structures that continually rearrange themselves in relation to each other. Virtualising the map via software flattens this ontological web and points to affinities that go beyond strictly dichotomous ontological codes.
Could this be what feminist quantum theorist Karen Barad speaks of when they employ the term “intra-action”, “to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably.”? Recognising self and place as intra-acting and dynamic agents affords a fluidity to the mapping of such a self/place. Fluidly mapping places-in-relation-to-self requires us to imagine a chorus of encounters rather than a fixed and static reading of place and self as separated entities. Place-making in lieu of the virtual realm becomes more about contingency rather than accuracy: we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time.
In reference/resonance to fluidity as a position of ontology, and the enmeshing of place and self, Opening to the Other speaks to contemporary feminist philosopher Astrida Neimanis’ deep and intuitive writing about watery subjectivity and relational placemaking. In her essay Hydrofeminism: or, on becoming a body of water (an inspirational text for Rhona, Berglind, and myself), Neimanis shifts the calcified ontology of the anthropo, liquidising the canon of Eurocentric knowledge to allow a hydro-logic to pool in. Speaking to our soupy origins, Neimanis asks: “What if a reorientation of our lived embodiment as watery could move us, for example, beyond the longstanding debate among feminisms whereby commonality (connection, identification) and difference (alterity, unknowability) are posited as an either/or opposition?” Identifying as watery affords human subjectivity a space beyond the strict ontological and epistemological binaries that have underpinned politics, ethics, cultures and societies since the European Renaissance. Neimanis’ hydro-logic encourages relationalities between alterity and ontology in the narrative of species and planet, in recognition of the critical and necessary importance of the human’s relation to the more-than-human-world.
The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities: what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.
- Donna J. Haraway
Visiting Iceland via the internet, I found devastating statistics regarding the rate of loss of the island’s glaciers. The ice that gives the country its name is melting into water at a rapid rate. In 2019, the country held a symbolic funeral for Okjökull, its first glacier lost to climate change. This moment is remembered with a plaque, both dedicated to Okjökull’s memory and in grim admission to future generations. It reads: “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” This epistolatory call to a future Iceland without ice needs no response: the reply laps in the island in the form of snow-capped waves, melting abnormally quickly into newly formed lagoons. What binds these processes together is water: a conduit for messages from within and beyond.
Opening to the Other operates through the density of distance in order to provoke unique subjectivities and modes of interbeing that chime with Neimanis’ call for hydro-logic. The combined practices of friendship and material exchange reorientate the artists’ human selves towards a position of watery alterity, gesturing a recognition of the complex continuities and discontinuities laid out by feminist scholar Donna J. Haraway.
The task of reimagining ourselves in relation to place within the context of climate-chaos-pandemic-realism, (a term I have been using for the Anthropocene), is pressing and urgent in new ways every day. As an ongoing act of collaborative placemaking in what has been described as the “neoliberal anthropocene”, Opening to the Other presents the importance of intra-placemaking between all subjects, including the place itself, in response to climate catastrophe. A fluid mapping of place permits the artists to lean into disrupted versions/visions of place and meshes/messes of self: acknowledging the relational and unfixed ontology of place in the context of climate could allow us to orient our responses better and more coherently to assist in its survival, and disrupt those who continue to undertake and/or promote its depletion.
Iceland’s letter to the future symbolises the often-paralysing nature of climate-chaos, now operating in tandem with, and in relation to, pandemic-realism. Reaching beyond the present to speak to climate-critical futures requires a notion of place-making that is intra-acted and residual, reckoning with the places of now and places of futurity in the site of the self/ourselves: is this place-making in, or in alterity to, the neoliberal anthropocene?
Source materials:
Hydrofeminism, or On Becoming a Body of Water - Astrida Neimanis (2017)
For Space - Doreen Massey (2005)
https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/massey-for_space.pdf
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life - Adam Greenfield (2017)
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene - Donna J. Haraway (2016)
More information on Iceland’s glaciers:
More information on intra-action:
https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/i/intra-action.html
India Boxall is an artist and creative researcher interested inspeculative material feminisms; autotheory; transcorporeality; psychogeography; and spiritual ecology. https://www.indiaboxall.online/bio
For more on ‘Opening to the Other’ the collaboration between between Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir and Rhona Eve Clews see HERE.