Estuaries: Ways of Knowing

How does newness come into the world/ How is it born?

Of what fusions, translation, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is?

What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Is birth always a fall?

(Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses)

Loci On Grief and Unlearning Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca The Atmospheric Knowing of Play An Extraction Barometer? Toni Pape On Anti-Identitarian Queer Possibillities Elioa Steffen On Materials, Empty Spaces and Surreal Encounters Jeanine van Berkel Loss and Pleasure in Leytron Benoît Antille and Other Places François Dey A Crushing Retrospective

The city of Utrecht, the place I have come to call my home, has a junction at the centre, called Neude. At which moment this place received its name, be it before or after it became the centre, is a bit unclear to me. Did its name lead to the construction of the city? Or did the growing city make Neude the centre, as it expanded outward?

I was once told that its name had no real meaning attached. This was at a point when the place held no real value to me. Neude then to me, sounded like the English interpretation of ‘Node’, translated as ‘New’. I imagined saying “I will meet you at new”. Each time I encountered ‘new’, it represented for me a junction that didn’t hold any meaning or gravity, except perhaps the reminder that I was a part of the new. A landmark, a point to reorient myself, a place that helped me recognize my position in the city. Then, a year ago, I was introduced to Oliebol- a soft deep-fried ball of dough, a Dutch (winter) delicacy, sold on mobile vans around street corners, across the Netherlands. A friend had bought me one, from a van that stands at Neude.

Loci: Positioning Myself

When he first mentioned where he got it from, I failed to visualize it as the same place that I associated with newness. Utrecht city centre, to a young eye, was the Dom Tower, Neude was the junction close to Dom Tower that led to the music venue Tivoli, the student bars, the crowded littered streets, cleaned overnight as if the previous day had not even occurred. Neude used to be the point on my way to school where I knew that I had taken a wrong turn, a left instead of a right to reach my campus building. I needed to cross the road, take a turn, and head back. Neude was also the place that made me realize that it was a Tuesday, since the flower market had popped up; that it was the right day to step out for a drink, because the streets outside the bars provided a place to bike, that it was September since I saw more international faces, shorter bodies and unacclimatised groups of young faces. Unlike where I lived (a bit outside the Singel), Neude reminded me that Utrecht was, in fact, a city.

Off late however Neude feels reinvented to me. Barely crossing it over the course of a year, or barely giving it a second thought since new students haven’t swarmed

September since 2020 because of covid 19 restrictions, since the bars have not remained consistently open, since I ceased to be a student, Neude came to mind only in winter.

I had also recently learnt a bit more about its history and the point at which it derived its name. Neude, or ‘Node’, used to be swamp land, a remnant of the old Rhine bed - Node literally translates as ‘swampy low’ - for a bit over five centuries. At the end of the 15th century, it was cleaned up and filled up to raise the ground for practical purposes. Since then, it has been a marketplace, a site for executions and collection of bodies, and a parking space.

documented initial conversations around the theme of ‘Estuaries: Ways of Knowing’, in the first zine titled Estuaries, ARIAS invited me to further develop the theme towards the formation of a working group

In 2021, upon learning about the truck that sold Oliebol, two years after having first encountered it, Neude bore the paradoxical weight of its English translation for me, and rightfully so. Facing the loss of what it meant for me as a student to what it is today for a person who has lived here longer than she has lived anywhere in the past 6 years, I realized that the arrival of older knowledge about the city, knowledge that was new to my senses, had required me to let go of the dissociative way in which I spoke of Neude, and by consequence the English interpretation of it. I was no newer to Neude than it was to me. Having to let go of my newness, of Neude’s newness to me, meant that I had lost the identity of a student, a stranger, or a traveller. The loss was gradual and not as unforgiving as the loss experienced when something is snatched away, but rather a loss that occurs to make way for the pleasure of new.

As a Content Creative, I was asked to propose how I could develop this further. After initial research into the thematic, literature reviews and conversations with the ARIAS team, this phase was inspired by one of the documented responses to Pia’s question “What questions need to be asked about the different ways of knowing?”. Recollecting the time after her father died, Laura Cull, one of the contributors to the previous zine, talked about “trying to live alongside my grief” which created a “frightening disorientation but also potentially liberating quality of bewilderment”. Thus began an examination of how knowing, while on one hand suggests a forward or transversal movement, also results in the loss or letting go of certain aspects, consciously or subconsciously.

“This position is open to someone that wants to think along with the ARIAS team in realising different formats for content creation around this thematic, making the research of the arias network visible, and bringing the different schools of thought in the ARIAS network closer together”

Between Loss and Pleasure It would be remiss of me to not acknowledge that this new association could easily make me forget what the place had meant to me. And I forget easily. Recently, when I had to give directions to a student recently, I completely failed to orient them through Neude.

Instead, I created a map from the Dom Tower to an overpriced hipster restaurant, that had not marked my experience in Utrecht in any way. It was all but personal, this path I had drawn out. And somehow, I found myself not adding Neude to this map, almost as if, with the loss of my identity as a student, Neude had also lost its meaning as a marker. I think this is because I had come to believe that Neude, and everything it stood for now, was not one for them to immediately learn, but something they found on the way if they lost what the city had first impressed upon them.

Driven by this sense of loss, not just of the person I was and the perspective of the city I held, but also with it, the things, places, ideas, philosophies, and people I had to abandon to really know this city, I was driven to explore the degree to which one lets go of things in the process of learning something new. Students leave lands, and disconnect with old friends and perspectives with the hope of making space for something new.

Whether the act of letting go or the sense of loss is a process that is needed to make space for something new, or if it is an inevitability of knowing, is what Estuaries: Ways of Knowing seeks to examine in this phase.Looking BackAfter Pia Jacques de Dixmude

Transfixed by the simultaneous presence of loss and pleasure in how one comes to know, pushed the enquiry to texts of Audre Lorde and her notions of the erotic in relation to the work we do, and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994). This does not to exclude the many other thinkers that not only thought through and with loss (Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Tim Ingold, Franz Fanon, Savyasachi Anju Prabir and Aveek Sen), but also those who have created unsolvable interrogations of pleasure and loss through music, film, myths, and paintings. While the research traversed a tumultuous terrain, it is primarily anchored to Lorde’s discussion that recognizes the erotic outside the realm of sexual pleasure and hooks insights on how loss manifests to make space for new knowledges and discard old ones. Together, it helped reposition the sense of loss and pleasure, together, as the erotic joy found in research and knowing practices/ experiences.

I approached artist-researchers whose work had either dealt with, touched upon, or embodied, this space between loss and pleasure. The zine begins with Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca as she had, in more than one way, guided my thinking. The 4-part email exchange, On Grief and Unlearning, documents the line of thought that helped

sharpen, unpack, and open the underlying themes that follow. The Atmospheric Knowingof Play: An Extraction Barometer? is an essay by Toni Pape. This essay marks a segue from Laura’s insights on the grief one experiences while unlearning one’s positionality, to the joy of letting go in the process of unlearning. Taking us through his experience of playing the guitar “amateurly”, Toni flips the lack of agency in the sense of loss, to resist the urge to colonize why one unlearns and how. In On Anti-Identitarian Queer Possibilities, and interview with Elioa Steffen, one of the co-founders of IPOP, I have tried to share the work they do, and how their queer-informed educational intentionality is building new ways of functioning within the institution. On Materials, Empty Spaces and SurrealEncounters is an interview with Jeanine van Berkel.

This conversation explores how materials help negotiate between what is lost and what one is searching for. For Jeanine, her practice of creating new surreal experiences of histories that escaped academic texts is a way to express, through the materials she uses, the softer ways of knowing. Those that are repetitive, processual, and unpredictable. From a valley in Switzerland, we are then transported to the waters of Curaçao. Loss and Pleasure in Leytron and Other Places, co-written by Benoît Antille and François Dey is a dialogue that reflects on their experience in cultural projects. The piece shares how the concept of the ‘Project’ has been employed to produce cultural dialogue and with it, manifest new kinds of loss and pleasure. This zine is thus a first look at the first few members of the working group for the theme Estuaries: Ways of Knowing, their individual and collective perspectives, and how they perceive the sense of loss and pleasurein the experience of knowing.

While the overarching deliberation over how new ways of knowing are theorized and practised by these different practitioners remains, what this zine attempts to foreground, are the negotiations one makes in the process. Some of the questions that underlie these contributions are: Is knowing more than just a forward-facing arrowhead? What could be the sensory, embodied, experiential visualisations of this position between loss experienced in the process of unlearning and the sense of pleasure in the process of learning? Do the stakes in this negotiation have an intersectional layer to them? Is there any agency in the loss experienced? What are the personal, social, cultural, political, and ecological stakes when deliberating over the sense of loss and sense of pleasure experienced in learning new ways? How do we translate this dance, between letting go, holding on and finding something new in research, writing and doing? To what extent do we willingly step into this?

Aishwarya Kumar

on grief and unlearning Laura Cull

Sometime in December, I was introduced to an essay by Laura Cull where she spoke about ways of knowing affected by the experience of grief. Her essay was a short note sharing with the reader, how the death of her father had evoked questions of what she knew and how. Talking about “trying to live alongside my grief” which created a “frightening disorientation but also potentially liberating quality of bewilderment”, her work became the pivot around which this phase, the zine, and the working group has developed. After having approached her, quite unabashedly, to mentor this process, she agreed to be involved. What follows is a four-part correspondence between Laura and I, where we discuss the darker crevices of knowing and unknowing and how it has implicated the ways in which individuals and communities are re-orienting their ways of working and thinking.

10th March, 2022

Dear Laura, Thank you for the very liberating call on Wednesday, it was a pleasure! It is quite a bright day to go down the path this letter does, but the sun seems to balance the rather somber terrain it will traverse.

I thought I would begin this letter with a line from your own writing in an earlier zine created for ARIAS. A rather poignant subject I imagine, but also one, critical to your journey in finding new ways of knowing (or as you have said, finding ways of unlearning) “It wasn’t until Dad died that I really came to know not-knowing in my bones” You shared this incident as a response to the question - “What questions need to be asked about the different ways of knowing?” It was this story that helped me realize that although in theory and practice, scholars, artists, and scientists have been exploring new ways of knowing, whether to find new perspectives, or dismantle other insidiously sticky ones, it is hard to find those that grieve over the loss one experiences in this process.

Whether it be acknowledged, unacknowledged, forced, or chosen losses, it seems to me that in the process and pleasure of learning a new way and finding new bits of knowledge, there is also the need to recognize a certain process of loss and grief where one breaks away from things previously known.

In earlier conversations between you and me, you brought up the notion of grief. You say that while grief is commonly associated with pain, you also see it as “ways in which it is also a kind of pleasure insofar as it can be experienced as a very strong form of connect to the person who has been lost. I know that I, for one, have been more fearful of the loss of the pain of grief itself; fearful that it will be replaced by not feeling the loss, or by forgetting” To me, this way of perceiving grief, speaks strongly to Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic as a source of power in every aspect of life. In her essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978), Lorde presents the erotic to recognize the utmost sense of satisfaction, “...a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire [...] not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others” (Lorde, 2). By honoring this power of the erotic in all aspects of one’s life,

a power which pays attention to what we do and how we do it (ibid.), Lorde believes that it would improve our quality of life, which I extend to the quality of knowledge we create (what he aims to do) and the way we create it (how we go about doing it).

To me, your fear of not feeling the grief after a loss seems to be the very fear that Lorde suggests forced a disconnect of the erotic from every aspect of a woman’s life except sex.

It also seems to me that to disconnect from the grief, is also a disconnect from the full force one could experience in its absence. Absence not by force, but over a gradual course of action and thought. Do you then believe and perceive ways of knowing as a process that necessitates loss?

I have been cautioned that these tracks of questions might be callous on my part. But after having spoken with you, I believe that you are as inclined to unpack the darker crevices of how we know, as I am. I believe this was a serendipitous encounter.

While I am trying to be bold about this line of thought, I would be unlikely to take offence, if there were some questions you would like to refrain from answering, as it is also something we would be sharing publicly.

That being said, I hope you don’t! I look forward to hearing from you. Until then!

Best, Aishwarya

1st April, 2022 Dear Aishwarya, Thank you so much for this beautiful and inviting letter, which I have taken far too long to reply. I am doing so today - finally - looking out on the garden where the snow that surprised us overnight also seems to have melted more quickly than I expected. This time last week, my family and I went to a small quiet beach and lay in the sun like it was the height of summer. Now, I am nestled underneath a furry blanket to keep my feet warm; not looking forward to venturing outdoors. What is this weather? There is a kind of underlying unease as people make jokes about it. “Welcome to the Netherlands”, some say, laughing. But it also feels like another kind of welcoming too: coming to encounter my own privileged expectations of the predictability of weather.

When I read your words today, a different pain comes to mind: a pain related to another process of (un)learning and, alongside it, I hope, another process of considering a new perspective. This time it is not to do with my relationship with my dad, but to do with my relationship to whiteness and to privilege in a wider sense. Here, the pain comes in the form of a hybrid discomfort which I associate with the shame of a belated empathy, a care that comes after the fact and, in arriving late, reveals the blindness or lack of feeling that came before. The privilege to forget, to not have paid attention.

I am sitting at a table in a café as a visiting researcher recounts the series of ways in which her visit - to Amsterdam, in 2022 – has been shaped by experiences of structural racism: from the trail of micro-aggressions in public, interpersonal encounters (in this café and others, on the street) to the energy-sapping institutional processes that intervened to construct her travel and accommodation experiences. This hybrid discomfort is a reaction to listening to the difference of what it takes for us both to arrive here, in this place, to be in conversation. What it was for me to travel to this city here as a white woman from the global north and her as a Black woman from the global South. And it is a reaction to the missing listening, the listening I have failed to do, the distance that I have allowed to accrue between my own experience and those of others. What is that? What knowing is that feeling? The pain of learning the inequality of pain itself; the felt coming to know (once more, again) of the unequal distribution of feeling itself? Perhaps, and yet, even in asking this – in trying to “unpack the crevices of how we know” (as you put it) – I feel as if I am falling into the white woman’s trap of centering myself once more – when really it is about how to center the pain I do not know, the daily pain I have the privilege not to experience.

I am sitting at my kitchen table reading a text written an artist who is a student at our

school and is also from Brazil. In the text she points to how the exclusionary tendencies of an institution can stay invisible if its norms remain unchallenged. It is only when those who introduce difference into a structure arrive – and refuse for that difference to be molded into another version of the same – that the mechanisms of exclusion (which were always there) reveal themselves as such. Structures of knowledge posing as neutral are shown to be biased; approaches to learning that consider themselves as premised on openness appear to have hidden boundaries and rules of engagement that make them open to some rather than other ways of knowing. In this context, those who do not belong to the institution as it knows itself as painfully deter- mined as troublemakers: too angry, always complaining. So, I suppose I am wondering if before we talk about the pain and pleasure of knowing, we also need to acknowledge the pain that can act as a barrier to even entering spaces of knowledge: schools, universities, learning institutions of all kinds. To talk about how financial inequality distributes physical and emotional exhaustion unevenly among artists seeking to develop their knowledge. And to talk about how to change our institutions so that they are neither silent bystanders nor active contributors to that pain.

I am sorry that this letter is in no way an ‘answer’ to yours. And you were kind enough to be concerned about how your questions about grief might land with me. In return, let me say: please do not feel in any way obliged to follow me down the line of thought that I have found myself on here, unless you would like to. I don’t mean to burden you with my learning.

Warmly, Laura

11th April, 2022 Dear Laura, The realization of the inequality of pain that you mention is something I am experiencing for the first time as an international post-student.

Having graduated in September, which was a knackering experience, the past 8 months have been a long period of limbo. Job hunts as an international is subjected to conditions, one too many. Not to mention that it makes one year feel like an incredibly insignificant amount of time. Upon receiving your email, the first thing I did was to count the number of emails I had sent out. It’s a bit too many to share, not including those you must send directly from the website. But since you speak about the in- equality of pain, I thought to mention this experience as, I for one, whether due to privilege or know-how of the Indian arts and cultural sector, have never felt the pain that I feel now. But to complicate it further, I imagine, having the privilege to spend a year looking for jobs after completing my studies, is an option that many don’t have. So, the inequality of pain, it seems to me, is also an intersectional kind of inequality, one that I noticed in the many ways I wrote about myself for the job applications. I’d like to share a few excerpts with you for a laugh more than empathy.

also where, I really enjoy how space and the body are conceived together.”

“I’d like to begin by stating at the outset that I do not speak Dutch, yet. I am sure this is an important aspect for the job, but I am really hoping that the other aspects of the application hold some merit”

“More personally though, a lot of my thinking and working philosophies are informed by the sea. It was near where I was born, brought up, and keep returning to. I would love to be considered for this role and I believe that I would do well with the way the space has been imagined”

“I am writing to wonder if there is any space for performers/ artists in a freelance/ fulltime capacity at? I am designer that moves between performance and media and have been involved and/ or produced a variety of shows. It would be great to know if there is a possibility here” “I would like to be in the Curatorial/ Art Direction Space, ideally with a studio + educational space/ workshop space where para level courses in Art, Science and Design can be taught and developed.”

“For the works of art, while Pina Bausch’s The Fall Dance is by far the best piece in space and movement for me, I find Sylvie Guilliem’s dance on Bolero, Damien Jalet’s work in Thom York’s Anima and Yoann Bourgeious’s work with NDT to be some of the most intriguing practices in movement, space, and design. Managing to change not just how the body moves but

“I am writing regarding the researcher position. I had applied a few months ago but never heard back. I noticed that the position was still open on the website. I was wondering if that is indeed the case” “I was wondering if the organization found somebody for the position of _______. I ask because the vacancy still shows on the website. Even though it says closed, I took the chance since I have been looking to work with for a long time, ever since we had looked at it for funding a few years ago for a collaboration between _________ and a dutch artist” As you can see, I began getting more creative, “I saw that you are only looking for a Lead Curator, so I am applying in that capacity. But keeping in mind that I may not fulfil all the requirements, I am hoping you could have a position for an Assistant Curator”

started managing my expectations, “I am very shoddy at dividing things, cakes, coins, a meatball. But unless I am needed to work with a knife specifically, I don’t think this should come in the way of my role as a Studio Manager.” and sought for humor. A great way, I have learnt, to deal with the pain of a precarious life. The reason I share these excerpts specifically, and in the correct order of timeline, is to try and respond to your statement - “... to talk about how to change our institutions so that they are neither silent bystanders nor active contributors to that pain”. The pain I specifically felt and continue to feel, is the loss of knowing who I am and was, outside the many bios I had been writing and rewriting. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before I caught myself reshaping what I wanted for the sake of a job/ salary/ visa (One time,

I almost presented myself solely as an Indian international without pausing to think about the incompleteness of that statement). But sometimes, in the darker recesses of the month, I wonder if it was a sensible choice. The residue of the pain felt after such a loss is complicated at best, and detrimental at its worst. I imagine that one could feel the inertia of not knowing what I want for a while to come, even after, and hopefully, obtaining a job to their liking.

Last year’s article by Sepp Eckenhaussen ‘Post-precariteit’

starts with an appropriate quote by Rosalind Gill, What are we to make of someone who says they love their work and cannot imagine doing anything they enjoy more, yet earn so little that they can never take a holiday, let alone afford insurance or a pension? How are we to think about a person who is passionate about the creative work they do up to 80 hours per week yet feel fearful that they will not be able to have the children they long for because of the time and money pressures they face? (Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat?, Rosalind Gill, 2009).

A willful and optimistic summer school on Post-Precarity organized by the Institute of Network Cultures that engaged with the many questions and experiences of our times was also more recently turned into a zine post a workshop series

What I hope I have conveyed through this letter is an elaboration over the degrees of pain that are unequal and furthermore, intersectional even for those micro-communities it may seem equal for. To this end, I wonder whether, institutions aside, individuals realize the pain of unlearning. Which on one hand could be one of the most humbling experiences. That said, I would like to share some of the documentaries and books that have been keeping me company in these times. It started with me revisiting the writings of Joan Didion after her death in December of last year. Her writings, not unlike the other authors captured by Deborah Nelson in Tough Enough, lived with the pain in a manner, I believe, you’re either born with, or forced to become. I could be wrong. Other than the book by Nelson, I found Susan Sontag’s diaries, Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Self-Respect, Sentimental Journeys, and the documentary based on her life ‘The Centre Will Not Hold’.

I think my question to you from here is related to the objectivity when one deals with pain over the recently popularized subjectivity towards pain or as Nelson opens the introduction to her book “to face painful reality unsentimentally” (Nelson 2017, 9).

Best, A

5th April, 2022 Dear Aishwarya, Thank you so much for your wonderful letter - which made me laugh (shoddy meatball dividing skills) and wince – _and for your thoughts on the intersectionality of inequality and on humour to survive the pain of precarity.

I have found it very difficult to write back and have started and re-started many times – _somehow struggling to move between the different kinds and degrees of pain we are touching on together, and somehow still wanting to talk about these differing degrees in one breath, to insist on their connection even whilst trying to understand what it is to respect their radical heterogeneity.

I read your letter with the still strong presence of memories from a gathering last night which I co-hosted with Maria Toko on the question of ‘radical research’.

I am read your letter with the memory of something that one of our guests – _Eliara Queiroz – _shared about her experience – _of pain and laughter, as a trans-woman artist living in Brazil.

Eliara spoke about her need to speak about the pain. In response to the question “what is radical research?”, she spoke about her need to speak about and from the pain of the scale of violence against trans people of Brazil. She spoke about her sense that if she does not talk about it, then it will not be spoken of. That she needs to be the voice for this pain in these kinds of settings, of the pain will going unspoken. What is it to approach the knowledge of this pain through listening to Eliara?

What is it to approach the knowledge of this pain through the statistics? “Brazil continues to be the country with the largest number of trans people killed… _In 2020 alone, there were 175 murders against queer people and trans women every 48 hours, one trans person dies”. Your letter makes the important point about the intersectional nature of the inequality of pain: that the inequalities and differences of experience continue to multiply, within micro-communities. And intersectionality matters here too: where most lives lost are black migrant women and trans sex workers.

But Eliara also spoke about the pain that this speaking itself causes – and the need, also, to not always be that voice. To not get trapped in the loop of only ever being able to appear as the one who speaks of pain with all the complex hierarchies and inequalities that can emerge between speakers and listeners in this context. “Sometimes I just want to have fun with you I want us to laugh together” she said.

I don’t know whether these speaks at all to your question about the objectivity and subjectivity of pain – _but it is what came to mind. The other thing that your question raises for me is a more theoretical response which comes from my grounding in a theoretical perspective more concerned to emphasise affect than emotion – or to consider the ways in which feeling operates in a trans-individual or impersonal manner, as a movement that does not ‘belong’ to an individual in any subjective sense so much as carries it along and ‘makes it reel’ 9as Deleuze and Guattari would have it). Pain is a kind of crossing here or a transformation from which some new semblance of an ‘I’ emerges (and then another and another).

And somehow, I need to make a third step to put these thoughts together: between the positioning of Eliara as the voice of pain (when she also wants to be the voice of laughter) and the impersonal power of pain.

But I am running out of time and will have to allow myself to leave these stumbling thoughts with you as they are.

Warmly, Laura

The Atmospheric Knowing of Play: An Extraction Barometer?

Toni Pape

The idea for the second contribution emerged upon reading the essay, Introduction: For an Ethology of Exhaustion by Christoph Brunner, Halbe, Hessel Kuipers and Toni Pape.

Initially, it was this paper that was going to be explored within this zine. After preliminary conversations, it became clear that while the paper would serve as one axis to discuss the kind of loss one experiences in the process of new ways of knowing, Toni’s experience with the guitar as an ‘amateur’ player would would be what the zine to explores. Two kinds of loss were unpacked in different ways. On the topic of loss and pleasure of new ways of knowing experienced through exhaustion, Toni had an exchange with dramaturge Nienke Scholts on 15th March 2022. The written piece written by Toni on the kind of loss experienced as an amateur musician, is what follows.

…where you can start to imagine a different life in this world...

What am I curious about?

How much is enough?

I. Out of extraction For years before and during the pandemic, the only way I was able to experience work was as a form of extraction. A strong sense of being emptied out accompanied everything I did. All the other experiential affects that usually factor into intellectual activity – such as curiosity, sociality, political urgency – were overshadowed by the dominant sensation that I was doing the busywork necessary to fill the spreadsheets that keep technocratic and capitalist mills running. The process of extraction had come to organize my experience.

Partly because of this experience, I have been drawn to think more broadly about extraction and the ways in which it gives form to our cultural and social institutions. Few would disagree that our European culture encounters the environment with an extractivist mindset that consists in “taking without caretaking, [] treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration” (Klein, 447). Yet, while initially reserved for the extraction of raw materials from the earth (Riofrancos), the term extraction is increasingly used to describe the many different ways in which global capitalism accumulates value by extracting it from various ‘external’ domains in the most unequal forms of exchange (Gago and Mezzadra; Szeman and Wenzel). European culture has a long history of extracting value by pillaging the earth, enslaving people, exploiting workers, oppressing women (Yusoff, Federici, Mies, Jaffe). Global finance, surveillance capitalism and the neoliberal workplace may count as more recent modes of extracting and distributing value inequitably and unsustainably (Mezzadra and Neilson, Crawford, Zuboff). European culture as we live it is dependent on – or addicted to – an extractivist relation to the world. We extract from the land, from the biosphere, from each other and ourselves. And nearing the exhaustion of various sources of value, Europeans’ greed for (life) energy has increasingly turned inward (Mbembe).

All these integrated modes of exhaustion must be undone and replaced by sustainable, ecological ways of relating to the world. Such a monumental task requires all forms of organized engagement grounded in what, following Sylvia Wynter, one could call

“being human as praxis” (McKittrick). That is to say, the transformation of our societies towards environmental and social justice requires a more fundamental reckoning with and reorientation of European culture. Too many of our cultural assumptions and habits keep positing an imaginary ‘outside’ in our very planetary midst, an ‘outside’ where more energy can be sourced and more ‘externalities’ can be dumped. But, as the above overview indicates, these supposed ‘outsides’ include many of us.

So how can one practice the ‘realization of the living’ when extraction has already taken its toll (Wynter and McKittrick)? Exhausted from my extractive relation to the world, I found it inconceivable to engage in creative practice. In exhaustion, I look at my pile of unread books with dread – All that unconsumed, unextracted value! – rather than curiosity and the joy of learning. Differently put, I recognize the extractivist mindset in myself, how it enlists me to approach the world in such a way as to ‘discover’ value in one place and deliver it to another. This is extraction’s normative way of knowing and it actively works against the invention of all those yet unknown ways to create values.

How then does one find one’s way back to the joyful practice of creating ideas, ways of knowing and values? At stake is nothing less than the renewed composition of one’s subjectivity, the search for resingularization of experience (Guattari 2000).

How do I know that the texts I’m reading, or the reading activity that I’m doing, is generative?

II. Play as a technique for resisting capture Recently, I started learning how to play the guitar. I picked it up during the pandemic not to fill empty time; in fact, a lot of time has to be made for such a slow, embodied process of learning. And despite the considerable effort that goes into the practice, it is immensely joyful to create and surround oneself in harmonic sound. But beyond that, learning the guitar has led me to an important realization: Making music by myself creates value in the form of enjoyment that is not immediately extracted. In the middle of exhaustion, I was able to make an effort because I knew for certain that the fruits of that effort weren’t going anywhere, didn’t need to be delivered. Sure, I have played for friends on one or two occasions – with hands wet from panic sweat. But aside from that it is an activity that feels safe from the capture of value. Amateur musicking is such a lively, joyful, and inventive activity also because it serves no particular purpose or goal. The whole activity is frivolously useless.

The experience of such unextracted joy is political. Brian Massumi has articulated its importance in an economic and political context, distinguishing it from adjacent feelings such as satisfaction, fun or pleasure.

Joy is much more than a pleasure. It registers the invention of new passions, tendencies, and action-paths that expand life’s powers, flush with perception. It registers becoming. It is an immediate thinking-feeling of powers of existence, in passionate intensification and tendential increase. […] It is the liveliness factor of all hedonic and emotional categories. It is not an emotion: it is vitality affect. (Massumi 2015, 71) For me, then, playing the guitar is a body-wide effort in which liveliness is expressed and intensified. It is where I can feel the creative edge of existence as the joy that resonates through me, the instrument, the room. (Sorry, neighbours.)

Massumi also refers to this joy as the qualitative and processual “surplus-value of life” and distinguishes it from quantitative surplus-value of capitalism (2015, 92 passim; 2018, 16.) “Capitalist surplus-value and processual surplus-value [of life] are, of course, relat-

ed, but they cannot be equated. The former is the systemic capture of the latter” (Massumi 2018, 16). What I’ve come to know by way of guitar play is that the surplus-value of my existence can to a degree be protected from capture-by-extraction. Guitar play allows me to compose a vacuole of spacetime thin which I can experience that creative and lively joy.

Perhaps this is how Kafka felt when writing, that visionary of the 20th century who didn’t write to be published but to live, who could only write in the belief he would never be published. What are the things we cannot create because we produce-for-extraction?

Fortunately, a song played on a guitar vanishes as soon as it’s done.

So, how do you produce your own subjectivity?

And how do you allow exhaustion to build a new world?

III. Atmospheric thought The anthropologist Tim Ingold has written of the “thinking” he does “through the cello” (Ingold). For him the sonic event called music is the result of a “correspondence” — a mutual attunement — between the player’s body and the instrument (204). The resonant bodies of the player and the instrument move together and mutually amplify their expressive force. The components of this event participate in an “interstitial differentiation,” mutually shaping one another across their differences (208). The harmonious resonance of the musical event fosters an affective feedback loop that not only expresses but also up-regulates the participating existences toward thriving (to speak a bit like Antonio Damasio whose notion of thriving is grounded in Spinoza’s concept of joy, cf. Damasio). This thriving is part of what can be known through music play precisely because it exists only in an as composition. But just as important is the way in which one knows. The know-how or skill of music play is “restless, fluid and dynamic. Above all, it is not embodied, in the sense of having been deposited in an inert and stable substrate, housed in the lower levels of some imaginary column of consciousness, but fundamentally animate —immanent in the sensuousness of a body that is mobile, alive and open to the world” (209). Inasmuch as it “blend[s] the cosmic and the affective”, this way of knowing is “atmospheric” (212). Thus, one participates in a relational field that is generative of the world, a worlding, rather than maintaining to the world a relation of externality that can be extracted from.

Playing the guitar has become a technique for knowing what brings joy for its very own sake, a kind of barometer for whether an activity can spark that self-affirmative creativity.

This barometer allows me to sense when a certain piece to play on the guitar resonates with me or not. But the technique has migrated into non-musical contexts. Moving from the guitar to that pile of unread books mentioned earlier, my renewed sense for self-affirming creativity allows me to appreciate when I read to extract information and when the reading actually generates ideas. I pursue the latter – and should I notice that I’m merely consuming information, I drop the book. No big loss. I try to read by appetite, let the ideas guide me from one book to another. In a very concrete sense, then, playing the guitar has taught me how to read in a generative manner again.

Notes: Would you like to talk about an amateur practice that has changed how you learn, think, and do?

here and now because they are actualized as dreamings, in resonance with the world.

What is another way of working that isn’t consumption-based?

If we keep extracting from ourselves, then how are we ever going to stop extracting from the world around us?

IV. The loss of loss What is lost in such a reorientation of one’s ways of knowing, this zine’s editors ask. In the very particular case of my little example, I’d speak of leaving behind rather than losing.

And for everything that’s left behind, one can (re)discover something else.

Works Cited Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

Damasio, Antonio. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures.

London and New York: Vintage, 2018.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2014.

I leave behind the self-evidence of an extractivist understanding of self. That is unfortunately not to say that my mode of living isn’t extractive; it cannot but be in the part of the world I inhabit. But the refusal to be extracted from is an important step toward the rejection of extractivism, albeit self-oriented and potentially self-indulging if one does not work to curb one’s own extractive relation towards other beings. But self-care can also be political. And besides I no longer believe that anyone who does consent to their exploitation can act as a force toward meaningful social change, however small the scale.

I leave behind a certain idea of “success,” the one that rests on ideas of overproduction, extraction, and social hierarchy. And I discover the joyful importance that the notion of “enough” carries. Enough, for instance, to be able to dedicate time to useless activities that bring joy. In her book For a Pragmatics of the Useless, the philosopher Erin Manning suggests that such an approach can affirm “another way of thinking value”: “Beyond use-value, the valuation not of what is given, but the capacity of transvaluation to perform a shift at the very heart of the process’s incompletion, of the process’s inherent indeterminacy. In Nietzschean fashion, value here derives from the in-act of the process’s own affirmation of its difference” (21).

Affirming the joyful differential that the useless pragmatic can create, I also leave behind the notion that my playful way of knowing should somehow be made productive. More generally this leads me to wonder whether part of divesting from an extractive relation to the world consists in letting go of the idea that one should realize all one’s potentials, that one should “make one’s dreams come true” so that “one can have it all.” Perhaps a post-extractivist society can embrace the idea that there is direct value in daydreaming, that the most extravagant fantasies have an affective reality that intensifies experience

Gago, Verónica, and Sandro Mezzadra. “A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism.” Rethinking Marxism 29:4 (2017): 574-591. DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2017.1417087 Ingold, Tim. “Thinking through the Cello.” Thinking in the World: A Reader. Eds. Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 202-222.

Jaffe, Sarah. Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London and New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Manning, Erin. For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.

Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017.

McKittrick, Katherine (ed.). Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. “On the multiple frontiers of extraction: excavating contemporary capitalism.” Cultural Studies 31:2-3 (2017): 185-204. DOI:

10.1080/09502386.2017.1303425 Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale Women in the International Division of Labour. London, Zed Books, 2014.

Riofrancos, Thea. Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.

Szeman, Imre, and Jennifer Wenzel. “What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” Textual Practice 35:3 (2021): 505-523. DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2021.1889829 Wynter, Sylvia and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?

Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Ed. Katherine McKittrick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 9-89.

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. ​​ Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books, 2019.

On Materials, Empty Spaces and Surreal Encounters Jeanine van Berkel

Whenever someone you know disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother, or friend, those who know us construct us, and in their several knowing’s slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end - Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet The pursuit of a new way of knowing is usually associated with a way forward, a way to open to new ways of knowing, to make more space. Does this also then entail leaving something behind and accepting the loss of other things? Starting from this heuristic premise, the following is a conversation with Jeanine van Berkel, exploring her practice, histories, and stories and unpacking how she finds and makes space for various ways of knowing.

Aishwarya Bones of the past, and Scores of silences, amongst your larger body of work - Soft Histories, seem to be ways to explore embodied knowledge that discloses gaps, silences and undocumented experiences. These embodied knowledges, according to you, are disclosed through your engagement with materials. Could you talk about your work with the various materials and how and how it helps you navigate those silences, gaps and undocumented experiences?

Jeanine I think maybe it’s nice to just talk a bit about how these bones are likely objects. Like when I started to use them, it was because I was really missing making something, During my bachelor’s, it was about explaining every logical step of why you would choose certain colours or certain materials. And I really wanted to unlearn this way of thinking. What if I just think it’s nice? Or that, it feels good? Or that, I like it? Why can it not be that simple?

Why should it be so thought through? I really wanted to go back to this way of feeling, or intuition or this underbelly feeling of why you choose to do certain steps. And I kind of lost that during my four years of graphic design.

Secondly, my mom is a ceramist. And I think she was also a very big part of my research.

A key player. There was this one time I suggested having a play session.

Just let’s talk about our shared history, and let’s make work with clay.

Although I recorded this session, we never listened back to it. We rehearse… my English is terrible today…. Yeah, yeah, I’ve never revisited that recording. Because it felt wrong. In a way that it felt wrong to use this actual conversation and share it with anyone besides ourselves. But I also wondered how the clay could become a documentation of the conversation. And what if the making, us touching this clay during this experience, stuck? What if this memory is attached now to these pieces of clay? I wanted to see it as a different way of recording something and attaching value to these pieces.

While doing this, I noticed that I was making the same objects, or wasn’t really making anything because my mom knows all the techniques and can make beautiful faces. But I was never trained that way. So I was just making very simple hand objects, repeating myself the whole time, repeating the gesture. And then my mom put them in the oven, and, I want to say baked them. I didn’t even think about the sounds once it’s baked. But then I

heard it, and whoa, this sounds exactly like coral on the water from Curaçao or also more generally, like corals. And in this way, I think it fitted nicely into my project or my research.

A new way to document but also a new way to bring back certain memories. And a way to experience calmness to deal with those memories. Because that’s also what I’m looking for in my own body. To bring this scan of quietness into the project and into how I felt or how I feel.

And then, I put them away for a long time, returning to them from time to time. So, there was a kind of repetition. Another aspect of my research - coming back to the same kind of objects, the same kind of materials, the same kind of topics, memories, ideas, or photos.

Thirdly, what I also find interesting with clay, is that you have this drying period. You start with very soft clay that’s moldable, you add water, you reshape it and work with it. And then you start this drying process. The colour of the clay also changes, from quite dark to light or lighter. And then, there is this point where you can make dust again, you can remake the whole process. So, you can start over in a way.

Then, I think it’s also about dealing with losing things or losing. Losing things that you cannot even hold, these kinds of topics, or this recognition. Neither is it something you can touch. And that makes it difficult to talk about, but also at the same time, it gives so much space to explore. Clay/ materials help look at it in a more pleasurable way. So much so that I cannot wait until I find this moment that I can say to myself, it’s okay. Loss is okay, grief is okay.

Lastly, I also think this way of like playing with softer surfaces and harder objects. These are also representations of historical facts, like hard and concrete things versus the softer things that slipped through your hands. I’m trying to create this comfortable space, where people feel comfortable because in a way I need to make this project to perform or to say certain things but then also to invite people to come closer.

Aishwarya When was it that you left Curaçao?

Jeanine I was four. I was quite young. But I think these four years made a big difference. And

while I am very Dutch in a certain kind of way, I think there’s always this disconnect?

Because I’m not from here and doesn’t feel like I’m from here. And even though I speak perfect Dutch, I still have encounters with people that ask, where are you from?

And, I don’t know…

What made this disconnect even bigger was that I grew up in a very small, white village in the south of the Netherlands. And there were not many people that looked like me, you know. I was, I am still looking for this recognition. I think if I was to move to a city like Rotterdam, then my experience would probably be so different, because there are so many people from the Caribbean, and there are so many people from Suriname.

Aishwarya How has surrealism helped you design the experiences you imagine?

Jeanine I think surrealism or imagination, in a way, gives me safety. It gives me the possibility to say certain things without everybody understanding what I’m saying. And sometimes it’s a kind of protection. It’s protecting my story. My mom’s story. Because I don’t think my project is for everyone. Or it is. And it is not. It’s accessible to a lot of people, and I would like people to relate to it. But I do think my project is mainly for people of colour, for African Caribbean community in a way. But I also think that other people can relate to certain aspects, but maybe not everything. I think that’s okay, that maybe not everybody understands everything about it. Because I think we need to listen more to things we don’t relate to.

Jeanine In a way that’s the first picture that I remember seeing of my biological father. These brown hands. And from there, I started to talk about him as the hands because I cannot call him my father because he was not. He’s not my father. You know I have a stepfather who I call dad. Because of course, being a parent is way more than being blood-related. So that’s why I called him in the rest of my stories - the man that looks like me or the hands. Not only as a character but also as a big part of my research method.

For example, I’m making all these bones with my hands. So, the hands are the main character. It’s my body, it’s the continuation, possibly of this man whom I think is my father.

It’s also a way to connect with my mother. And in so many ways it connects my mother’s Dutch side to my father’s side in Curaçao, with my body. And because it’s my mom and my biological father had a difficult relationship, this wasn’t really a topic growing up. It was never discussed. I just felt my mother’s pain. You know, sometimes you feel generational pain from somebody. And I felt it. So, I didn’t dare to ask too much. And I think this research project gave us way more handles to talk with each other Going back to surrealism, my mom understands what I’m saying, because she knows what I’m talking about, in a way. Like, she holds the key in a way. And recently, in this cabinet at home, it was there for the first time, I saw this little picture of him.

Aishwarya Do you feel like you stopped searching after that?

I also think surrealism and imagination are fun. It’s easier to talk about something difficult.

Yes, my research is about a certain kind of like trauma or sadness or loss or silences and absences, you know, but it’s also everyday life. And sometimes it’s not that heavy. And sometimes I don’t feel like only talking about heavy things. So, sometimes it’s just fun to play around with characters and words.

Jeanine I think it added to my research. It’s like this ongoing storm. Like I’m haunting myself with the same questions. I don’t think I will ever find the answer. You know, so it’s always this loop that I’m in. But at the same time, it’s also everyday life because I’m living it. So it’s also normal. It’s not like I’m missing anything. So, I don’t think we’ll ever stop in this way.

Aishwarya I was wondering about the picture with the hand of your father. Or of the man who you suggest is your father. Can you tell me more about that finding?

Maybe, until I decide that it’s over.

Aishwarya Do you see the research that you do contribute to the academic literature, methodology or writing?

Jeanine Well, I do think it’s a part of history that’s not been thought about so many times yet. And that’s also why it’s called Soft Histories because I’m very much interested in memories that become your own true stories. For example, my cousin remembers my biological father well. There was this one encounter where he picked my cousin and my mom up in his Jeep and they went to have ice cream. So, I didn’t know he had a Jeep or liked ice cream. And now I am trying to find all these different pieces through people that did know him. Because there are so many gaps in my story, in my history. How do I fill the silences? Or the spaces? Like what do I do with it? And I think like filling it with other memories, that really helps, but it’s also about imagining what’s there?

Sometimes it feels good to imagine that my mom and my biological father had romance It’s so nice to imagine a certain kind of thing that maybe didn’t happen. So going back to that question, I do think like, that what I’m trying to do is a very important part of history that is not valued too much yet. But I do think it’s part of or should be part of academic discourse. I really missed that in how we look at history. And I do think feelings are valued or should be more valued in the academic space. I do think it’s important to say, I chose this colour, because I think it’s nice.

Aishwarya Would you also say methods that you’ve used can/ should be borrowed for academic purposes? What do you think it offers?

Jeanine Good question. Because in a way, it’s so personal I’m not sure where you can explain a certain method. But I do think it’s important to let people know that it can also be different like we don’t have to have to put so much weight on only academic things. And I think that’s all something I noticed, during my critical studies, education that there was really this kind of atmosphere that only academic writing was the way to go. And it’s not something that the critical studies department said, but it was more like this common reasoning in the group. And I don’t think it should necessarily be this way. I think they should exist next to each other. Like it’s not the one or the other.

Aishwarya And finally, perhaps from a heuristic perspective. What do you make of this negotiation between loss and pleasure? Do you think that the sense of pleasure experienced in knowing something new or in learning a new way of thinking and doing, always necessitates a certain kind of loss?

Jeanine I do think my project is very much about loss and about grief and about trauma and melancholy. And sometimes I’m really searching about what it means to feel pleasure around it. Because it’s not always pleasurable to think about. Sometimes when I’m working, I just have to cry. But I do think the imagination, the weaving of possibilities to create this missing piece of history helps.

What also gives me a lot of pleasure is the space where people can enter when I am just making the objects. And people feel very invited in a way like they, it is easy for them to approach me, which I really liked. Because then we had conversations, and I think there’s also so much pleasure to be found in connecting with each other and finding this, this community or people that understand. And that really does make me feel good. And I think especially with people of colour, there’s this understanding, because some things you don’t have to explain, you know what I mean? Like there’s already this common ground.

So I do think there’s this kind of loss, but then I was like, maybe loss is not already always something bad or negative, you know? Maybe it’s always about adding certain new knowledges. Adding to how much, you know. But maybe, in the end, it’s also about choosing what you let go of. Because it’s also about missing something and on a very personal level, missing a figure that looks like me and missing this kind of recognition.

#Meeting notes during the preliminary conversation with Benoît

Loss and Pleasure in Leytron and Other Places Benoît Antille and François Dey

Project as a concept without a story. Project as a process of becoming Project as an open space Project as a way to be i contact with the world Project as a grey zone. Project as a negotiation Project as an exchange of different modes of existence Project as a way of new institutionalism. Project as economy Project as a technical tool. Project as a changing function of technical tools Project as a way to go beyond the apparatus. Project as a neutral process Project as a way to address loss of verticality Project as a way to change the relation with knowledge, as a way to create humility towards something bigger Project as a praxis you can’t finish Project only as a medium to produce something Project as a way to go back to the pleasure of research Project as a way to not share the pleasure Project as a way to share the pleasure project as a way to go as far as I can to explore ideas Project as a way to loose connection with reality, to live in a bubble Project as a sanctuary, an island, a separation Project as a way of shrinking networks Project as a way to assess pragmatic sense of loss Project as a way to learn on the job Project as a way of working Project as a way of understanding practical knowledge/ applied knowledge Project as a way to recognise the false divide between knowledge and praxis Project as a way of life Project not towards autonomous knowledge, or knowledge for the sake of knowledge PRoject as a way for operative knowledge Project as a way to not reify the self and knowledge Project as a way to change with intensity Loss and Pleasure in Leytron and Other Places

Benoît Antille François Dey

Ideas of loss and pleasure have been key parameters in my activities as researcher and curator. In 2012, I initiated an on-going reflection on the ‘project’ precisely because this notion came to embody loss: a loss of sense in artistic production. This reflection has been first triggered by a trend: that employed contemporary art as a means of territorial development in rural areas. At that time, I was based in the Valais, in the Swiss Alps. In the summer of 2012, several projects were inaugurated: including Land Art festivals in natural parks, biennials in ski resorts, and a piece by Michael Heizer that the artists himself—according to an American curator and writer who collaborates with him—considers a ‘non-sense.’ The first research project that I realized, addressed this trend.

This research did not focus on artistic projects themselves, but on the system that financed and legitimized an artistic production, evaluated for its economic and touristic value. I addressed the links between artistic production, the creative economy, and managerial cultural policies. To this end, the impact of project management on the artistic field came to be the focus of my on-going research: at the heart of a project economy, ‘cultural producers’ were being instrumentalized; they had become problem-solvers or service providers. Responding to the loss of sense, my undertaking became a critical source of pleasure, that of identifying mechanics of instrumentalization. But because of a theoretical imaginary, the system that I designed all the agents were assigned to fixed positions, failing to grasp the essence of the project which is about movement and agency.

Around this time, Amsterdam based artist François Dey helped me to raise awareness on the agency at stake within projects. We collaborated on two projects that I am going to introduce here. But before that, let me reposition concepts of loss and pleasure based on the logic of the ‘project’. Projects are not theoretical but ingrained in the texture of the real. The project is a mode of action or production which is intrinsically heterogeneous. It is shaped by multiple determinations which bypass boundaries set up by disciplines, spheres of values, and sectors. As such, it crystallizes different and sometimes antagonistic expectations. There is not only one way to do projects, but a multitude: it can be a philosophical project, a social, educational, managerial, architectural, or artistic project, etc. While all these different conceptions of project-making function in the same way (the project

embodies our ability to produce without a preestablished model, to change, to innovate; it is at the same time the goal that triggers action, and the process leading to the expected goal), their systems of values, methods and goals can be radically different, not to say antagonistic.

Heuristically, one could compare the project to a thermodynamic process: i.e., a process that leads to a final state through loosing energy or information. That is not only to say that projects burn our energy, while they do lead to burn outs, rather it suggests a process of loss that is consistent with the process itself. Projects are not realized in laboratories or studios. When one conducts a project, one must constantly reevaluate it, reposition it, and renegotiate it according to external circumstances. In the end, projects are never exactly what one expected them to be in the beginning. All along the process, there is room for judgement and agency.

The pleasure that one finds in a project, stems from this agency, which cannot be measured in absolute terms; it is just about the best possible answer that one can give in a situation here and now, the best possible decision that one can take.

Doing a project is to master uncertainty; it is an art of ‘driving’ or ‘conducting.’

That is why it might by compared to a journey into the deep sea, which in Ancient Greek culture embodies “a way which has not been plotted in advance, a voyage undertaken across an unknown region.”1

1. Detienne Vernant 152

In Leytron, loss and pleasure A proposition such as the “a mise en abîme.” We’re here in a Creative Village, with a designated budget; kind of a top-down experience of being welcomed in this place.

We’re like any of these art projects in the countryside but our flip side is to keep an eye on the eyes to reflect over such situation not merely doing it. In the heat of the time, Benoît had asked me if I’d be interested to work on a piece for the opening night of the project. Reading Ludwig Hohl at the time, I wanted to find a way to transform his thoughts about work & process and their directions, their movements between the inside and the outside, the personal and the public.

“Work is useless if it does not come from the inside…”

“Work is useless if it isn’t directed to the outside…”

Contrasting the need of sense for one to work, as much as the necessity to transform the work, these thoughts toward a public otherwise remain in the self, in the vector zero. Local tenor and soprano were embodying the villagers while a little less local, the viola, cello and piano were to interpret the twenty minutes classical piece, with these half-deformed Ludwig Hohl sentences were to be uttered as homophones, “Peu rose et suce”, little pink and suck. In the singing one could still discern all words even though it felt a little too cerebral. I remembered quietly listening, my shoulder leaning against the pillar thinking, what have I done? I’ve brought the opera in this village, a flash of that top-down image gleaming once again.

In 2016, I invited François Dey to take part in a project in a village situated in the Valais, between two cities in the plain.

Against the doxa of project management, Creative Villages has been a bricolage, improvised from the beginning to the end: a chimera made of contradictory expectations. My initial goal was critical. Realized through the research institute of an art school, this project sought to address the value of socially engaged practices in the rural territory. But, after I got invited by a local politician to develop a cultural program destined to increase the visibility of his village called Leytron, the project got funded by Swiss Art Council Pro Helvetia, in the framework of a funding scheme called “Cultural Diversity in the Regions.” Among other projects that I had realized, this is the one that best embodies the essence of the project: the most heterogeneous one, made of multiple and antagonistic determinations, deeply engrained in the real.

Later when trying to even the ground with the village I overheard an elderly lady talking about the deceased church organ. I didn’t need to hear much more. This was my solution.

It could work as a common denominator to repair, as a dead figure to take care of. Soon enough I met a whole bunch of people attempting to turn that broken instrument on. The church had become my atelier. A triptych of event appeared swiftly in a drawing. I’d organize an aperitif discussion in order to listen and discuss the sick organ and have its old pipes dusting off, resonating again. A reply to an echo in this space which had not been heard for more than 40 years. I’d fantasize about this sound experience, how it could reconnect old cells existing but asleep for all that time in these few people gathering in the church. That night after a long discussion on possible ways to organically self-organize and rethink how to keep such instrument alive, I had admitted to them that I wasn’t here to save it. I was only an image producer and what I wanted to depict was a march in support for the organ. At that point, I realized that I had been instrumental to this project. The excuse of saving this instrument was to create images which I thought were to become a larger reflection of a collective genuine support for a lost cause.

The goal of Creative Villages was at the same time to develop a cultural program in Leytron (including exhibitions, performances in the public sphere, talks, and a residency program) and to critically address the dynamics of project-making in the process of doing it. Now, I realize that one cannot be in and out of a project. On cannot be at the same time conducting a project and addressing it from outside. This impossible position generated lot of tension in Leytron, not only with the villagers, but also with people in the artworld who met difficulties to position themselves within Creative Villages. Because of these tensions, feelings of loss and pleasure were always mixed and moving. The critical take on the project that I had elaborated over in the previous years was put at the test daily. Most of the artists and scholars that I had invited, expected to be there to develop a solution for the local community. Many of them found it useless or inappropriate to question the raison d’être of our presence in Leytron. As my critical endeavor was about to turn into non-sense – and my pleasure into loss – I have been forced to put into question my expectations and strategy. François and Jeroen Boomgaard, who organized a workshop with me, helped me to pay attention to the various interactions, connections, contradictions, productive tensions, and antagonisms generated by Creative Villages. All that created energy.

Long before returning to the residency, we took a month to gather different communities for the parade. A motorbike club “The bad boys” were invited and supposed to embrace the parade and asked to blow their pipes now and then as a response to the composition. Elderly people from the retirement home were to drive the parade and set the pace with their rollators and wheelchairs. School children were to carry organ pipes of the musical notes D, E, A, D2. Almost as a private joke to B. Nauman.

Musicians from the local brass band were to play these tones on four consecutives segments of the march. It was an attempt to hold these sounds at any time together. To close it off, the locals were sent an open letter explaining the idea and inviting them to join the parade as a gesture of support.

Lastly we had arranged the Iranian composer to come over and play the opening piece on the broken organ but he got stuck in Brussels. A young organ player came in as replacement and Aram accompanied him live with a keyboard connected to Skype. What we forgot to do was to turn down all cell phones in the church as the public came in. A consequence: the Internet connection was as broken as the organ. In the end we were thankful to Aram as he answered through Skype over the speakers placed on the balcony of the church. It felt as if a higher voice was answering us.

On the parade’s morning, I drove down the hill the weather turned bad, and a barrage of calls ensued. The voice of a man working at the retirement house explained that they couldn’t come. The ‘Bad boys’ would not answer the phone.

Only four musicians showed up. Not willing to budge, I told them we had to do it anyway. I remember driving back on the mountain thinking about the uncomfortable situation of trying to get musicians to join along with the director of the brass band introduced my proposition to them. The room stood quiet until some black sheep in the crowd broke the silence as if jumping across a ravine to leave their village. Accelerating and breaking in the serpentines thinking about my writings, reflections over how the project was going on, this pitfall experience was about to find a fine place for a touch of drama in the novel.

Creative Villages pushed me to further the research on the idea of the project and its economy. Focusing on practices rather than theory and critique, the new research project took the form of a movie addressing a specific form of knowledge. One that does not seek to make statements, state truths, or propose definitive worldviews, but to solve problems, act in the right way at the right moment. A practical knowledge consistent with cunning intelligence, that of technics, and of action. Retrospectively, I can say that it was around that time that I started to address the notion of project in the right way.

I chose four artistic projects located in the countryside and interviewed the artists and curators in charge of these projects. We (almost) never talked about ‘art’ or ‘artworks,’ but about forms of organization, management, fund raising, collaboration, creativity, practical issues, ethics, etc. The terminology that we used was not that of art, but the way of thinking definitively belonged to this field.

We talked about the search for meaning, about right gestures, care, and methodological freedom. About the ability to see what is not seen or visible, the ability to connect and assemble things that are not used to fit together, etc. All of that infused their projects; and the logic of the project infused artistic practices in return. ‘Art’ from this perspective, must be useful. It must produce real and tangible outcomes. “Failure is not a solution,” as one of the interviewed artists told me. What I started to become aware of in doing this new research project was like what François had already been showing me in Leytron: he was solving the problem that I had set up in the village.

What has been confusing for other participants is that they thought that the problem to solve was to be found in the village, while the problem that I had in mind was the project economy. Something that existed outside the single village. François understood it very well and navigated with cunning intelligence and precision between the pretext and the context proposed by Creative Villages.

Three years later when Benoît called me for what he named an “indecent proposition” I found every reason to turn it around and explain that any situation had potential if we could deal with it.

Pandemic and multiple attempts had still not freed the project. I came back to Benoît and asked him to become my context. I was in need of discussion. I wanted to understand his writings about “the project” as a lens through which to talk about form. I kept referring a tantric manual in which if I made abstraction of the theme it addressed, I would observe insightful descriptions of relations and dynamics of movements. Focusing on oneself when in physical relation. How to not attempt pleasing anyone but oneself. As if circulation would flow from there on. As I read Benoît’s thesis introduction about the project, I had similar realizations. An arrangement which transforms the way things are entangled in the production of a work of art. As I read the multiple perspectives of the project’s declination in that vocabulary of management of various areas of practices (with no example cited), I created my own narrative. I filled in content to a text which was proposing the structural lens that I could work with. It made me think of my own indecisiveness to create content, as if the context was suggesting the missing element in the production of a piece.

After three projects on the ‘project’ and its economy—the work on landscape sculpture parks, Creative Villages, and the movie on practices and strategic trickeries of project artists—I decided to further this material by starting a PhD at the University of Amsterdam.

Because I started working on the notion of project in 2013, this research had come to occupy a large part of my life. Because it has become such an important aspect of contemporary life, the project has become my main tool or concept to develop a long-term reflection akin to a praxis. A source of great pleasure, which I have no shame to compare to an initiation, on the model of Greek philosophy. In other words, a philosophy, or art, or research, as a form of life. This growing satisfaction helped me to accept working as a kind of ‘service provider’ for the research institute of the art school that gave me this incredible opportunity for several years: time and money to freely develop my own projects, experiments with my own ideas. This new perspective put me face to face with the project economy proper to an academic context. No more the creative economy, but the knowledge economy shaped by the Bologna Process. Exactly like Creative Villages, projects that I started writing and doing in this framework looked like chimerical assemblages.

These ones, however, did not seek meaning, but networking, visibility, communication, intersectoral collaboration… Some were almost beautifully Dada in their absurdity.

I had been coming to a new studio in Amsterdam. A place I use to visit from 11pm until late and now I would come around 9h30am and leave around 4pm. The building used to be a printing business, a film school, later a squat, now an alternative cultural initiative. My thoughts would meander and soon enough I started to write memories of dreams as if it provided something that was reality and not just imagination. Alongside that, I became attracted to specific spam emails when I was digging through my trash bin.

I was fascinated by the rigorous aesthetic, flashing CMYK colors and brutal language mostly addressing sexual content. I got so hooked that I would await new spam mail from the same machine or collaborator, which would once again would surprise me by generating another form with these strict graphic elements. I started reproducing these structures, typefaces and colors while summarizing my dream notes into keyword notes, few lines in punchy colors. Around that time, I proposed my solo show as a group show. It felt like clearing what had stayed in the exhaust pipes for too long. Few minimal paintings, some conceptual works, I started emailing these acquaintances about art works I had seen sometimes ten years ago and had kept in mind.

I was inviting them because I wanted these specific pieces to come together in this group show. Things were going slowly and I started reproducing these art works in my studio. I wanted to spend some time with then, have a run at the production process as if it would open some understanding why I felt so close to these works. Later, in discussion with some of the artists I realized much of my discoveries had only to do with my own pursuit. I praised the way these works had enabled new thoughts to spring up. As if the frame of doing and the specificity of the pieces had sharpened my own reflections. A mélange of the pointiness and open…

At some point, I’ve been asked to develop a project related to the health and computing sectors of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO) to which my art school belongs. The idea was to develop an application for smart phones that was meant to use public art in the Valais as a trigger for hiking. Another time, I’ve been asked to develop a project on contemporary art & biking. Because a famous bicycle race was organized nearby, and because it was happening at the same time as a famous rural fair, the different sectors of the HESSO got special funds to undertake research projects on biking that had to be presented in a booth at the fair… I was ready to embrace the ‘loss of sense’ and become pragmatic. I called François and proposed him to get paid to do something absurd but easy. But in only a few minutes on the phone, he managed to transform my “indecent proposition” into a meaningful collaboration.

We had talked lately with Benoît about generosity of listening. In that light of these last reproductions, I could feel similar position in the act of paying a homage to someone, about studying through practice as an oeuvre. Attempting to read it but experiencing different levels of engagement with it. Separately, we talked about reacting. About how one seems unable to find the space to listen but attempts, in every way to hold one’s position. I shared with Benoît a recent experience when a workshop went adrift and somehow failed. It was a walk but I couldn’t find the way to open up and propose what I wanted to share. I ended feeling the need to write the whole walk, describing every detail and ideas, which went thought my mind at the time. I explained Benoît how once again I understood the value of uncomfortable moments, which span in time where one cannot escape. The discussion went on about how cracks that would appear in a structure as if its mechanism would suddenly appear and confront itself along the thought which had been projected it into reality. How sometimes when things flow too well, these problematics seem to disappear behind the illusion of the play.

The project on biking started just before the Coronavirus crisis. Even though the race and the rural fair came to be cancelled, the different sectors of the HES-SO kept on working on their projects for a while… until it became clear that these projects would never end long enough to be presented. As it happens with most projects, they were condemned to remain at the stage of proposals… All the other project on biking, but not ours. Something unusual indeed happened. Planned and funded by the administration of the HESSO, our project started living an autonomous life. We started the project in September 2019, and are still working on it today, through different forms, including the dialog we are proposing here. François’ idea was to use the bike as an object to address the idea of the ‘line,’ from an aesthetic perspective, and as concept or figure in philosophy, anthropology… Lines that give shape, connect, build links, create patterns, networks, etc. I realized that the project on biking itself came to play this role. It keeps connecting us… As I am writing this, I remember my thoughts before calling François to offer him to work on the project on biking: if I had to dedicate time to this, I wanted to do it with him, because of his ability to make sense of things and situations.

Over the years, projects after projects, I built a small network of people with whom I keep working. A network based on friendship and mutual respect, within which one learns from each other, in the long term. Once in Leytron, I invited two French scholars specialized in cultural policies. To conclude the talk, one of the two gave his version of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister: to him, the most important was not to produce like and artist, but to live like an artist, to experience life through this lens within a community of artists. Art from this perspective becomes a mode of existence. In some way, it is exactly the way I look at the projects I did to these days…

I tend to re-read stepping-stones texts, which give me the feeling that I haven’t completely lost track of my position.

On a call with Benoît, we discussed romantic realizations of sharing life moments together. We wondered to what extent things that we do not share with a public are part of what might create the energy to keep going when a sigh of the nose, the closing of the eyelids and a horizontal head shake clears off the attempt to make sense or feel the connected to what others are dealing with. I emailed Benoît a text excerpt of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Wisdom and Destiny. Maeterlinck was addressing the character of Saint-Simon in the context of Louis XIV inner court. He observes the miserable fate of few people roaming around that Saint-Simon and start to draw

the gap between the thoughts, the values as reflections which that group might have shared, the uselessness of these for a nowadays reader and the possible agency they might recall. He wonders if there ought to be a value not only in the reflections but in the sensations these calls. « Thought, of itself, is possessed of no vital importance; it is the feelings awakened within us by thought that ennoble and brighten our life. » Maeterlinck compares the value of standing halfway in a truth or genuinely engaging with what might become a failed reflection for others. He wonders if in action, people start to think with their whole bodies. Pushing myself upward, leaning my buttock against the top of a concrete wall in order to complete, what was supposed to be the last part of the text I asked Benoît: but how can we show that even romantically agreeing this is one important matter not to say love we share? How can we consciously write that we understand what our posture toward the outside means? Position it toward what we think, the actual state of affairs is. We cannot escape the reflection and merely say, it’s because we love it.

on anti-identitarian queer politics elioa steffen

On an afternoon in May, after having had several calls with Eli and Szymon in the month of April, Eli in a voluble way provided me with some of the following insights. Rather than meeting personally, or even over video call, which has by this time, become a strong competitor to physical meetups, the interview was conducted in a relatively old-school manner. Over a call where neither party could see each other. The result of which was this brief conversation that introduces the work IPOP does.

Nearing two years now, I have had a profound sense of disagreement with the more popular neo-liberal discourse that has taken over, you name it – mental health, education, politics, ethics and morality, relationships, self-help and so on. To tackle what this is, and why it occurs is not the intention of this piece. To understand what it is that one stands to lose in such a culture though, is brought up quite a few times through this conversation.

The loss that I am talking about is quite pervasive. It is a loss that at times is not mourned over. A loss that is in fact, welcomed with delight. A loss that is the result of a certain stakes being given no importance. And so, when Laura Cull suggested I speak to Elioa and Szymon from IPOP, I opened the door with some caution.

The platform IPOP or In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities, a platform initiated by Szymon Adamczak and Elioa Steffen in September of 2021, seeks to focus on the educational practices that centers anti-identitarian philosophies. IPOP, in other words, is for anyone who is in some way dealing with queer histories, lineages, and practices – ­ ‘You belong if you say you belong’. This statement, in distinction from what the opening paragraph of this piece seems disgruntled about, is an attempt, in some way, to resist defining queerness in a particular set of ways. Rather than gatekeeping, rather than asking ‘what’s queer about’, rather than entering into a discourse through definitions, rather than having some agenda outside the binary and all the assumptions about that experience, rather than being a project that creates a lgbtq+ identities, rather than having anything to do with identity at all, the conversations IPOP hopes to activate, begin with ‘how’. For Elioa, this question of “what’s queer about” is an anti-identarian gesture, a way of wondering what is queer without having to define who is queer How to understand queerness as an idea and a philosophy that one can opt for, whether or not one’s desires and experiences fall within what heteronormative would consider “normal”?

How do we address the desire for and problems with belonging [I think belonging speaks more to what I’m trying to get at more than universality], not for the sake of the individual but with the individual?

How does seeing the world through a queer gaze help heal, to quote the drag artist Taka Taka?

In their words – IPOP has less of a queer prerogative- a sentence that weighs heavily with larger factions of political movements that seek to address identity. Eli clarifies that by aligning their work with educational intentions, IPOP wants to imagine different pedagogical practices for anybody, individually and institutionally, who has experienced struggles with non-normative ways of learning, thinking, and doing. “I think there is a more interesting paradox at the heart of IPOP, which is that it is queer, it is for queer people, it does emesh itself with queer communities and lineages and Szymon and I are both very invested in the survival and thriving of queer people. And yet, this is not where IPOP’s ambitions end. We also want heteronormative people to realize queerness has so much to offer them. Furthermore, we are not pursuing our goals through an identarian kind of exclusion. I don’t think queer safety, aesthetics, spirituality, you name can only be served

by queer only spaces or endeavors, although these spaces serve a purpose. I think IPOP operates under the assumption that queerness and queer people lose something when we are exclusive and, although sometimes this price is worth it, IPOP seeks to understand what can be gained when we open and stretch queerness. Although of course there is also a price to this, so we go cautiously in these directions, ready to believe that our strategy is a mistake”

If we really want to create a cultural climate where biases can be challenged and changed, all border crossings must be seen as valid and legitimate. This does not mean that they are not subjected to critique or critical interrogation, or that there will not be many occasions when the crossings of the powerful into the terrains of the powerless will not perpetual- ate existing structures. The risk is ultimately less threatening than a continued attachment to and support of existing systems of domination, particularly as they affect teaching, how we teach, and what we teach.

- hooks 1994, 137 Sometime during my thesis, I was told that to listen, to pay attention to what the other was saying if I was to ever be able to learn. Although I believed to have understood the statement, one so deceivingly simple, it was upon revisiting my thesis for the purposes of this zine, that I realized the depth of the practice I was advised. One that I had failed to practice.

A crushing retrospective

With the onset of the COVID19 lockdowns starting in the first quarter of 2019, the institutions around the world were speedily shutting down their physical environments, leading to the closure of spaces in a way never imagined, which, quite obviously (and sometimes unexpectedly), affected the socially accepted handshake. With no place to congregate, educators, artists and scientists were searching and creating new ways of continuing education praxis.

Michel Serres, in an endearing essay from an octogenarian’s perspective, says that the new school-goer Thumbelina (petit poucette) and Tom thumb (petit poucet) shared the space between the actual and the virtual. They were transforming knowledge to be in the here and now but also contributing to the production of copies, excerpts, versions for the future, co-producing knowledge through Bricolage modalities for digital consumption. Simultaneously receiving various perspectives, they were challenging absolutes, producing micro ecologies of knowledge as interventions to grand narratives, and learning through wonder rather than compliance. While a reader born around the 90’s could resonate with his insights, it is his unsaid observations on what is left behind to adapt to the current technological condition, more specifically during and postpandemic, that dictated the zine.

During this process, the act of listening was necessary for me to observe how and why someone yearned for a new way of knowing. Whether or not the new way had its

contours already defined. Listening at this point, was to be able to imagine, as closely as one can, what the other was describing. During the same process, they were telling me about how they mourned, rejoiced, noticed, and acknowledged the experiences that had been left behind. Listening becomes a bit more complex at this point. It is not always the reception of what is said, but the things unsaid. The silences and crevices that have been filled up by what is being said. At the end of this zine, there are many questions that I haven’t found answers to - can the awareness of loss, remembrance of things we leave behind, grief for what leaves us, or bitterness for that which never was ours truly liberate us when finding new ways? I don’t know. What possibilities does the acknowledgement of loss provide us? Perhaps, to begin with, a slower culture in how we come to know.

What I hope is that this zine does offer some perspectives on how the participants of this zine translate this dance, between letting go, holding on and finding something new in their thinking, doing, and making research practices.

Aishwarya Kumar

Contributors Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca is Lector, Head of DAS Graduate School and Head of Research at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts in the Netherlands. Her current research project is the AHRC-funded Leadership Fellowship, Performance Philosophy & Animals: Towards a Radical Equality (2019-2022).

She is a founding core convener of the international research network, Performance Philosophy, joint series editor of the Performance Philosophy book series with Rowman & Littlefield, and an editor of the open access Performance Philosophy journal. She currently collaborates with a range of artists and companies including Fevered Sleep, Rajni Shah and Every house has a door.

Toni Pape is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the aesthetics of contemporary television and participatory media cultures, and his current research project, entitled “The Aesthetics of Stealth,” investigates modes of disappearance in video games, television series, and contemporary art. Dr Pape is a member of SenseLab, an interdisciplinary, international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, that, by describing its activities through ‘research-creation’, has the goal of fundamentally rethinking “theory” and “practice” in a way that overcomes this binary division. We approached Toni Pape for the panel discussion after a different, slightly more informal yet critical conversation, where he discussed, amongst other things, colonized minds of students, asking different questions, and specifically why we learn what we learn, he carefully considers the criticality of decolonial processes: “We are talking about lives here”.

Nienke Scholts practices/d dramaturgy throughout manyfold collaborations with performance artists (2007<); Veem House for Performance (2013-2019) - where she developed the publication series Words for the Future (2018); as ARIAS’ programme coordinator (2019<); and through her research as a fellow of THIRD!/DASresearch, Amsterdam University of the Arts (2018-2022). Her research focuses on dramaturgies of work in artistic practices; unpacking notions like ambition and exhaustion, developing pausing as a practice, and exploring her particular interest in darkness as a potential mode of thinking and doing (work) differently. In 2019 she was a Saari Residency grant receiver. She loves to draw and to walk.

Jeanine van Berkel is a graphic designer, visual researcher and writer. She is interested in what way her multi-ethnic body relates to the bigger colonial structures – especially focusing on the relationship between Curacao and the Netherlands. In her ongoing research and story through the semi-forgotten memory of herself and (un)known history of her various motherlands, she explores urgent questions, looks for answers and shapes what silence looks like.

Born in Switzerland, Benoît Antille graduated from the MA Program in Classical Archeology and Art History at the Fribourg University (Switzerland, 2001) and from the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco (2011). He currently works as assistant-professor and researcher at EDHEA – The Valais School of Art and is PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. He has been curator at the cultural center Ferme-Asile (Sion, Switzerland), between 2003 and 2009, before becoming independent curator. Between 2013 and 2019, he has been leading research projects on the links between site-specific practices, the creative economy and cultural policies.

François Dey’s practice oscillates between the staging of collaborative situations and individual escape. Create a discussion around the very process of the elaboration of a work, an engagement with an external proximity by observing the dynamics which settles in the glasses of its observations. Born in 1981, he finished engineering studies in Friborg before graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He was a participant in the residency program of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.

ARIAS Zine #2 | Estuaries: Ways of Knowing Editing, cover illustration & publication design Aishwarya Kumar Copy editing and support ARIAS Amsterdam Printing AUAS: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

Special thanks to Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Toni Pape, Nienke Scholts, Jeanine van Berkel, Benoît Antille, François Dey, Andy Dockett, Anuradha Kumar