Foreword

Tresoar and VHDG have generously invited me to develop a project that addresses the base of their mutual concerns: re-thinking “iepen mienskip” (open community) in a meaningful way, without surrendering complexity. I compiled texts by a group of thinkers to be studied by a small group of participants, borrowing strategies for analysis from the performance arts. The choice of contributors followed a few basic criteria: that their work is thoughtful, innovative, and valuable; that it resonates with the trigger-topic ‘Unknown grounds’; that their practices are diverse, yet connectable (backgrounds varying from architecture to history, mathematics, philosophy, design, archival studies, and art); and that they work in The Netherlands, yet come from all over the globe.

A condition for innovative discourse is hybridization 1 . This doesn’t automatically make innovative discourse good or useful, but risks must be taken. Old tools cannot address the complexity of an ever-changing reality. We stand on unknown grounds. We are called to put our minds and bodies to work, but it is crucial to work collectively with others. When we work collectively, the chance to incorporate new tools into our practices is far greater. This insight was the starting point for this project. It is both an epistemological affirmation and a political one. The notion of foundation or ground is conceptual, imaginary, but not any less real. We need a collective speculative reflection about the link between these two spheres of reality we occupy (the conceptual and the concrete). To think other worlds might seem impossible, but we can think our world otherwise and in this way find unexplored potentials in it.

We have many names for this more or less undetermined ‘thing’ that calls our attention: ground, foundation, reason, land, landscape, territory, earth, soil, dirt, dust. Ground is background. It is on the landscape that all images appear. There is no form of the self that is dissociated from that background: it informs identity. Who will be the actors of future social transformations and how will their identity influence the nature of these transformations? Territory is our link to others, and therefore, it is what makes us vulnerable. It is what shakes our certainties, something that we cannot completely grasp. We exist within it, but need to make sense out of it, using the most refined technology as well as with our complex and malleable perception system. Territory is a construct formed by myth, stories, facts, memory, fiction, and pure will. Territory allows for a sense of rootedness, but also dispossession and resistance. What happens when ideas hit the ground? Where do we stand when we say “we”? The recursive nature of this question sets us on course to complicate the notion and practice of ‘the commons’, understood as the values and resources we need to share because of physical proximity. The commons is a task that must be collectively performed, negotiated, and defined, with the risk that it will be unattainable.

Today, the need to invest effort in this endeavor is strikingly urgent: anti-intellectualism and tribalism are on the rise around the globe, and it is no coincidence that democracy is being questioned with increasing openness as powerful societies choose to push their limits in the direction of a form of politics that I don’t hesitate to directly call fascism. Simultaneously, some democratic agendas push discourses on behalf of the “common good” or the “public interest” as if these were pre-existing, indisputable entities, promoting cultural merchandise “accessible to all”. This gesture of totalization should alarm us as well. “Social and economic questions are oversimplified, and the potentially critical originality of the concerned gesture is abandoned and surrendered to normalization and domestication.” 2 In light of this reality, we should eagerly refuse to simplify. For example, it is a challenging task to read texts from an alien field, but if we read together, we might be able to navigate uncharted waters.

The authors compiled in this booklet rethink the possibilities of agency in relation to “unknown grounds”. The texts are richly thought provoking as they oscillate between the abstract and the concrete. Each author is an interdisciplinary practitioner (the slash [/] is a crucial part of every contributor’s biography), and each has developed distinctive approaches to address the initial prompt. With varying styles and concerns, the texts do not come together harmoniously, rather, they cohabit a space in a compilation, sometimes blissfully echoing each other, sometimes producing fruitful frictions.

Sissel Marie Tonn’s “Daily Research” is a mix of poetic personal journaling and geological/artistic research, which served as a base to develop her artwork “The Intimate Earthquake Archive”. This installation addresses the man-made earthquakes in the Dutch province of Groningen caused by the processes used to extract natural gas from the ground. Her work is attentive to sensory and perceptual structures of attention as well as perception within changing environments.

Andrej Radman is a theorist focusing on New Materialism, in general, and the Ecologies of Architecture in particular. “Groundless Grounds” is an example of a challenging specialized discourse, meaning a discourse humble and courageous enough to dive into preceding texts, not to use them as authority, but to experiment with them like a chemist with new a compound. From the perspective of relational theory, he delves into an investigation of perception and the realm of affect, questioning the very notions of representation and communication. One statement, in particular, stands out: “one cannot understand a system unless one acts on it.” To justify such a thing, quite some work needs to be done.

Bert Looper’s background as a historian and archivist comes together with poetic sensitivity. “Unknown words, unknown grounds: Language, landscape and memory” invites us to consider the role of a language, specifically the Frisian language, in relation to landscape and memory. Far from nostalgic, a main question hovers over the whole text: How can a language generate a ‘sense of place’ and environmental awareness, while acknowledging that an environment never ceases to change?

Theun Karelse’s “Machine wilderness” reflects on the history of landscape in European art and the emergence of landscapes in artificial minds. In his project ‘DeepSteward’, AI’s are left alone to learn from environments that have minimal human presence. His field research stems from the idea that “the most urgent questions in our society are outside our front door, in what was previously called nature.” 3 His project is hopeful and exciting, offering an alternative to the dark reality of AI learning from the worst of humanity.

Masha Ru’s “Museum of Edible Earth” is a provoking artistic and sociological project that deals with personal desires while questioning the prejudices of public health institutions and so-called ‘common sense’. She researches “Geophagy,” the practice of eating earth, not from a detached anthropological perspective, but one that is sincerely connected to the ground. A companion to her text, “Tasty, Edible Earth” by geologist Bert Boekschoten, depicts his personal and professional perspective on eating dirt.

Finally, my contribution, “Of Asymmetrical Legs, Scars, Infrastructures and Exile,” is an exploration of how personal experience affects theoretical research, and vice versa. The text aims to provide a glimpse of the political-philosophical considerations that are embedded in my work “Change on x, change on y”, a piece that reimagines a scar on my brother’s leg as a fictive territory, playing with the multi-layered concept of trace. I try to give ground (as unstable as it may be) to the possibility of new “strategic belongings.” A vulnerable notion of the self mingles with the old concept of sovereignty and questions the distinction between a line that would separate the inside from the outside, from a jointure that keeps things connected.

To end, I’d like to share a fresh thought. Even though the texts in this reader might not all seem to directly address the issue of openness in an explicit concrete political sense, I would like to invite the reader to consider these approaches as each translates this problem into their specific field. In this sense, the political dimension of openness might not be so much ‘talked about’, but effectively performed. “Unknown Grounds” can function as a worksite 4 : a small and incipient civil-political community that sets itself to the task of translation, in this case not necessarily linguistically speaking, but in terms of opening up the specific fields of inquiry, allowing passings from one to another, attentive to the subtle connections between what could eventually form strategic alliances.

For this to really happen, your participation, dear reader, is crucial. I’d like to propose that while we read and when we meet, we commit to really engaging in conversation: with the texts and later with others. Let us set aside the fear of not understanding or the anxiety of having everything clear at once: they are opportunities for learning. I hope we read critically, not in a futile way, but in an honest way: that we let the texts resonate in our minds and bodies, being attentive to what they do to us, how they play with our memories, thoughts, emotions, and to what we can do with them. We may hate a text, we may feel joy and the excitement of a new discovery. Texts are also here for that to happen. We can use text as a space for encounter with others. An encounter can be quite a peculiar thing, both passive and active, both careful and violent. Let us be strong and gentle. Let us share our half baked opinions, but also let us take this only as a starting point: when someone talks, the other’s responsibility is to hold that person accountable. What could this look like? Arguing can be much more than just logically agreeing or contradicting each other. Let us be like children tirelessly asking “yes, but why?”. Let us get carried away with enthusiasm, but also put some effort in questioning how things could be otherwise -there must be a myriad of alternatives, right? We can do something valuable. Let us be unashamed for a while, let us be curious and adventurous.

Notes:

1 Razmig Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere, Mapping Critical Theory Today, translated by Gregory Elliot, Verso, 2014, p.62

2 Rebekka Kiesewetter, in “The Relay Conversations, Post-digital publishing”, online publication, 2018, https://instrumen tinventors.org/research/relay-conversation-the-reading-room-27-28-post-digital-publishing/

3 http://www.inmidwest.nl/huurder/theun-karelse/