C.3.1 Communicating with Plants and Place: Corporeal Empathy in Aesthetic Processes

Elvira Hufschmid, Queen’s University

Despite a dominant Western narrative of economic expediency towards the land and the world in general, a post-human discourse suggests that humans do not merely act on matter, but that humans and nonhumans are agential actors in a world that is continuously coming into existence (Barad 2007, Braidotti 2013). Long before the invention of the term post-humanism, North American indigenous ontologies have addressed human’s thinking within the land and indigenous people’s comprehensive practices and forms of knowledge in reciprocal connection to it (Simpson 2014, Coulthard and Simpson 2016). But how and where does this relationality translate into an artistic practice? My presentation discusses aesthetic practices of artists who engage with the non-human world by presuming and acknowledging its inherent agency and also rendering an intrinsic interrelationship visible. I will introduce my own sensory drawing practice and discuss its potential of visualizing a subject positioning that is based on a reciprocity with the world as a living, self-organized, and intelligent formation, while at the same time locating and reflecting on this subject within a settler colonial context. The presentation includes a documentation of drawings which represent the results of a perceptual process that takes place when visiting chosen sites or communicating with plants. The question arises if an empathetic aesthetic practice expresses a mutual relationship to the world as described by the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, when she talks about the subjects of knowledge – the experiencing self– as being  “embedded, embodied and yet flowing in a web of relations with human and non-human others” (Braidotti 2019).

C.3.2 Enchantment in Place: Big Trees, Reflective Depths and Perceptive Praxis

Martabel Wasserman, Stanford University

In Trees in Paradise, Jared Farmer writes:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I have become drawn to the spectacular(ized) redwoods and state parks of Northern California where I live as a site of meaning making and political theorization. Given that public space is increasingly privatized and access to outdoor recreation is contentious due to the pandemic, what are the implications of wanting to retreat into the woods? In Bird Relics, Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, Branka Arsić writes in Thoreau’s Walden and Other Writings:

She argues changing epistemological frameworks limit our possibilities for understanding these descriptions as literal. In this paper, I will explore how enchantment, defined as perceptual pleasure in which reality can be experienced in ways that challenge neoliberal modes of looking, led me to an academic inquiry into representations of tree and the legacies of displacement and extraction that have shaped what we see. I will anchor my analysis in discussions in Thoreau’s Walden and Other Writings and concurrent representations of redwoods, focusing specifically on The Mother of The Forest; the bark of which was systematically removed and displayed at the Crystal Palace in the 1851 World’s Fair. I will explore how the conservation and environmental destruction mutually constitute each other and the potential of enchanted looking as a research praxis which challenges these paradigms.

C.3.3 The Methodology of the Periphery: Diasporic Subject(ivity) in the Collectivity of Cultural Production

Faune Ybarra, Simon Fraser University

The seeds of a dandelion were blown out by a wishful person or the wind arriving at different places rather unperceived. Suspended in the wind, they are bound to become a new flower which will become seed which will then become... Resembling the processes of dandelion seeds, diasporic groups, the population of a particular geographical region relocated somewhere else, is in a state of constant dispersion, of constant arrival (Papastergiadis, 2008). Along this process of cyclical dispersion, I locate myself. A diasporic artist writing from Vancouver, coming from Newfoundland, but born and raised between Oaxaca and Mexico City. Among diasporas, the ambivalence of home is shared as a trait from which we begin to structure the margins of the hegemonic centre, the shared idiosyncrasies of the places we inhabit.

Where a progressive populist view of the margins would suggest to “center their voice” in order to hear them, I argue for seeing in the periphery itself a vantage point, a space to observe the interrelation of human, non-human, and land. In this essay, I put forward the “methodology of the periphery” a methodology that traces the edges from which diasporic artists create as a way to contextualize and center the dialogical relationship community, non-human, and materials diasporic artists work along with. In acknowledging these margins and places, the reimagination of new understandings of land, time, and our personal relationship with collective memory (Halbwachs, 1950) emerges.

It is my hope that by putting this methodology in practice, diasporic artists can exercise agency over their own subject(ivity) asserting that these relationships are as important as the work itself. To name oneself a “diasporic artist” instead of centering the media or temporality from which one creates is to state awareness of how one’s work might be perceived, is to push against national-state and ethnic affiliation and the assumption that these, on their own, can act as a spine for cultural production.